Slow Freights = Big Problems for Small Towns.

In addition to enjoying long-distance train travel, I’ve always been fascinated by freight railroading. It’s a huge business in this country and the various freight railroads have all undergone big changes over the past decade or so. Obviously, the volume of freight being moved ebbs and flows along with the economy, but even in slow times, there are thousands of freight trains moving every day.

But for a lot of towns, particularly in the Midwest, all these trains can be a problem. In many cases, when a main rail line runs through the middle of a town, duplicate police and fire facilities have to be built and staffed on either side of the tracks. The potential problem is obvious: What if the fire station is on one side of the track and a building on the other side catches fire? And what if the fire occurs just as a 110-car coal train is rolling through town at 20 miles an hour? Worse, what if the train has stopped and is waiting for another train to pass by.

That’s a worst-case-scenario, but ordinary folks in these towns can understandably get fed up when intersections are blocked 20 or 30 times a day by these slow-moving freights. And, of course, that’s when somebody loses it and, in frustration, impulsively drives around the lowered barriers at a grade crossing … and gets killed.

The obvious solution is for these towns to construct underpasses or overpasses for the automobile traffic, but each one costs may hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Here’s an interesting account of this exact problem – residents and elected officials of a typical small town meeting with representatives from a mega-billion-dollar railroad. Genuine concern and good intentions all around, I’m sure, but no real solutions in sight.