(The following story by Patrice Relerford appeared on the St. Louis Post-Dispatch website on June 15. D.R. Downs Jr. is a member of BLET Division 107 in St. Joseph, Mo.)
Officer Al Jones sat beside a railroad engineer and stared through the windshield in disbelief as two bicyclists ignored flashing lights, swept around a gate and darted across railroad tracks just ahead of a locomotive bearing down at 40 mph.
“Their bodies wouldn’t have made a sound,” Jones remarked, radioing to St. Louis police colleagues in a plain vehicle nearby who tracked down the surprised cyclists for tickets Tuesday morning.
Don Downs, of Ballwin, the engineer, and Craig Whitacre, of Granite City, the conductor, said they weren’t surprised at all. It happened moments after Downs described his work with the words, “If you stay out there 30 years, they say you’ll be in at least one accident.”
So far, Downs has made it six years safely.
Police ride along occasionally as part of “Operation Lifesaver,” trying to discourage motorists – and in this case bicyclists – from tangling with trains at crossings. This time, they invited reporters.
Railroads employ their own police officers, who usually write these types of citations. But in St. Louis, rules require regular police to do it.
In a different sort of stakeout, officers in an unmarked sport utility vehicle cruised Manchester Avenue, shadowing the pair of locomotives from Kingshighway to Knox Avenue, back and forth, over and over.
Five motorists got tickets Tuesday, too.
Dennis N. Ziesmer, a senior special agent with the Union Pacific Railroad police, said grade crossing accidents have declined dramatically in the 36 years he has been on the force.
In Missouri, it bottomed out in 2002 with a record low of 12 crossing accidents – three with fatalities and two with injuries. In 2003, there were 64 accidents, nine fatalities and 32 injuries. Through March of this year, there were 12 accidents with three fatalities.
Figures for Illinois were not immediately available.
The decline so far this year may be related to the more than 150 tickets that Ziesmer and cohorts have written in the St. Louis region in the last year. He also credits prevention efforts like Tuesday’s, and work with school bus drivers and driver’s education classes.
“People don’t realize that coal trains, many of which travel 35 miles per hour, take a mile to stop completely,” Ziesmer said. “They carry too much weight to stop on the dime.”