(The following article by Steve Orr was posted on the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle website on April 13.)
ROCHESTER, N.Y. — Doug Midkiff, a Fairport resident who worked in the railroad industry for nearly six decades, said CSX’s area work force “is bare-bones in terms of people.”
Two years ago he successfully lobbied CSX to repair what he considered dangerous problems at the North Main Street crossing in Fairport. “They don’t have people to respond to problems,” said Midkiff, a former transportation director at Eastman Kodak Co.
“We feel that we have adequate numbers of employees in all of our engineering department to maintain the level of safety that we should maintain,” said Gary Sease, a spokesman at CSX headquarters in Jacksonville, Fla.
CSX has been under the gun for possible maintenance shortcomings for nearly a decade.
In 1995, the Federal Railroad Administration began a review of CSX’s safety practices. The agency broadened its oversight in 1997, with intensive inspections that uncovered a host of problems. Some inspections focused on track conditions and some related to substandard upkeep or testing at highway crossings. The audit said the railroad did not have enough signal maintainers or supervisors.
The federal agency also criticized CSX for poor maintenance of its pole lines, such as one running along the West Shore line where a San Francisco man was electrocuted last year. Police reported that a 550-volt electric line had fallen from a pole in Brighton, putting it within reach of the man, who grabbed it while jogging in the area.
In 2000, the FRA published another audit. It noted some improvement by CSX but also found continuing maintenance shortcomings, including at highway crossings. The federal agency noted evidence of staff shortages and layoffs, including some in the Rochester region, and found that maintenance work in the region was being deferred slightly for budgetary reasons.
The years of oversight culminated in the signing of a formal safety compliance agreement in early 2000 in which the railroad pledged improvements. The federal agency released the railroad from the agreement two years later, saying it had upgraded its maintenance practices. During that period, CSX hired 125 track inspectors — a 30 percent increase, said Sease.
But in December, another arm of the U.S. Department of Transportation raised new criticism of CSX. The DOT’s Inspector General’s Office said in an audit that while CSX track conditions were generally adequate, CSX lagged behind other major railroads in replacing the gravel “ballast” that supports tracks and provides drainage. The FRA is now reviewing CSX’s ballast-replacement practices.
Sease said CSX does meet “industry norms” and is checking to see whether it under-reported the amount of ballast it replaced.
Ed Long, an assistant general chairman for the Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way Employees union, said CSX no longer has enough employees in the Rochester area to keep ballast clean. Long, based in Fredonia, Chautauqua County, said the local work force, now six to 12 people, was twice as large a decade ago.
“They used to work around crossings, dig out mud and replace ballast. Since they reduced maintenance forces years ago, they don’t have enough people to go out and do preventive work. Now it’s all catch-up work, on spots that are already defective,” he said.
Most work force reductions occurred before mid-1999, when CSX and Norfolk Southern Corp. took over the former Conrail system in New York. But CSX has made further cuts, he said.
“Back in 1999, I didn’t think they could knock it down from what it was without closing the railroad. But they did knock off a few,” Long said. “I hear from the guys out there that the tracks are getting in worse shape all the time because they don’t have enough people to work on them.”
Eldon Luttrell, an official of the Brotherhood of Railroad Signalmen union, said the Rochester-area work force has been reduced about 20 percent in recent years.
Floyd Mason, a vice president of the union based in North Carolina, has been working on a joint staffing study by the union, the FRA and CSX that grew out of the FRA’s enforcement action.
The study, which should be finished later this year, is expected to show that in some cases, CSX does not have enough signal maintenance personnel to keep up rail equipment and to perform periodic tests required by federal regulations, Mason said. In one region, he said, maintenance workers do not even have enough time to finish the mandatory tests of track signals and crossing equipment.
The study, which looked at three distinct territories served by CSX, is finding a correlation between maintenance staffing and signal failures, he said. Upstate New York is not one of the three territories.
“What has happened over the last dozen or more years is that the railroad has tried to do more and more work with fewer and fewer people,” Mason said. “There’s only so much that people can do.”