(The following story by Tom Lochner appeared on the Contra Costa Times website on March 21.)
RICHMOND, Calif. — Several times a week, Eddrick Osborne waits in his car as trains as long as a mile pass the crossing outside his home or the one by his workplace.
Stuck there, he gets plenty of time to wonder “what if?”
“Through the good graces of God, we haven’t had an incident of someone waiting for an ambulance or with a house on fire and having the train blocking the entranceway,” said Osborne.
As rail traffic patterns shift and developers look to fill spots near the urban core, the long-standing friction between people and the railroads they live near is being exacerbated.
From Richmond to Pittsburg and beyond, residents also worry that idle tank cars could leak hazardous chemicals. They complain the horns that trains are required to blast in town wake them in the wee hours. And they say trains sometimes just go too fast.
“There are more trains in California today than there have ever been in the history of our state,” said Eric Jacobsen, who leads the California chapter of the rail safety group Operation Lifesaver.
Martinez, for example, sees 54 trains a day, including 30 passenger trains, Jacobsen said.
In Hercules, residents worry about graffiti. At Richmond’s busy Cutting Boulevard crossing, Amtrak trains go as fast as 70 mph. Trains pass right by schools in Richmond and San Pablo that were established decades ago and near one in Oakley that was completed in 2001. And all over the corridor people complain about train horns.
“They blow at both (Parchester) crossings all time of night,” Osborne said. “Living out here so long, I’m kind of used to it in a sense, but sometimes they will wake you up at 2 or 3 a.m.”
In Contra Costa County, eight people died on the tracks last year either when their car was hit by a train or as they walked, stood or sat on tracks, including two likely suicides.
Building fences is not the railroad’s responsibility, said Burlington Northern Santa Fe railroad spokeswoman Lena Kent. “But if a municipality wants to build one, we would be more than cooperative.”
Asking railroads to shoulder the cost of overpasses and underpasses would be both unrealistic and unfair, she said.
“We’ve been a part of these communities long before they existed,” Kent said.
Even so, Kent said, Burlington Northern Santa Fe chips in 5 percent or 10 percent of the cost of projects to put roads and trains on different levels, known as grade-separation projects, Kent said.
Contra Costa County Supervisor John Gioia, who is sponsoring a forum Saturday on trains in the area, said railroads are leery of setting costly precedents.
“Railroads are very protective of their rights,” said Gioia. “They are reluctant to make too many concessions in one community because they’ll be asked to make the same concessions in others.”
In just the past month, the city of Pinole built a fence at the end of Pinon Avenue to block off the tracks there.
“Railroads by their very nature are an attractive nuisance,” said Pinole City Manager Marc Grisham. “People climb on railroad cars, they climb under them.”
Harkening back to a 1993 spill that sent 25,000 people in search of medical attention, residents of Hercules are concerned about tank cars stored on Union Pacific tracks along Railroad Avenue, said Community Development Director Steve Lawton.
Lawton is also concerned about trespassers, especially adolescents.
“It’s possible to ride your dirt bike (along the tracks) from Richmond to Crockett and even Martinez,” Lawton said. “There’s nothing to stop you — except getting killed.”
The Hercules shoreline, where hundreds of residential units are under construction, is also where the Union Pacific runs. Last weekend, police stopped a group of teenagers who were crossing the tracks near the Historic District to get to Hercules Point, where the relic of an old dynamite plant stands. Further north, fishermen entered the tracks at the Rodeo-Hercules line.
“The trick is to channel people away from the danger and to provide access in a controlled way across the tracks,” Lawton said. “Even a 6-foot-high chain-link fence will magically develop entry points if there is an attraction.”
That’s what happened near Richmond’s 98-unit Triangle Court Apartments, where people made a shortcut between North Richmond and Richmond’s Iron Triangle section — named after the 11/4-square-mile triangle described by three railroad rights-of-way. On Feb. 11, a 28-year-old man was critically injured when he was hit by an Amtrak train as he crossed the Union Pacific tracks there.
On a recent visit, a reporter found entire sections of the fence missing, including one about 70 feet long. In 1998, 13-year-old Ramon Roy was killed by a train in the same area. Housing Authority deputy director Manuel Rosario said the city plans to build a wrought-iron fence there.
Richmond even won a multimillion-dollar grant in 1994 for a grade-separation project on Cutting Boulevard. But in 2000, as the deadline for using the grant approached, the City Council decided not to use it after learning they were required to use it on an overpass, which would have required relocating businesses.
At Marina Bay, an area of offices, parks and homes, the major problems are not the dangers of trespassing on the tracks but the risk of being trapped behind them — and the nuisance of listening to the trains move along them.
Since securing a contract more than a year ago to transport cargo for the Port of Oakland, the Burlington Northern has increased round trips between Richmond and Oakland to between eight and 10 a day.
Because railroads are governed by federal and state laws, efforts to legislate noise locally are largely futile, Gioia said.
State PUC rules require trains to sound their horns a quarter mile before reaching a grade crossing, said George Elsmore, a supervisor in the PUC’s rail division. While federal law does not currently mandate sounding the horn, an interim federal rule that will likely become permanent in December does, Elsmore said.
The federal rule has a provision that would allow local jurisdictions to declare quiet zones where train operators would be barred from sounding their horns except in emergencies. But extra safety measures, such as crossing gates that are impossible to drive around, would have to be added.