(The following story by John R. Pulliam appeared on The Register-Mail website on July 9.)
GALESBURG, Ill. — A backlog of freight trains because of flooding that closed a number of tracks in Iowa caused some complaints along the BNSF Railway’s Barstow Subdivision line in the city’s Morton and Rock Island avenues area. A railroad spokesman said the good news is that all the tracks have been reopened.
Alderman Ken Goad, Ward 1, brought up the issue during closing comments during Monday’s Galesburg City Council meeting. Goad said most of the complaints were about diesel fumes from parked train engines infiltrating nearby houses. Goad said he received what he termed an “irate” message on his answering machine from a resident in that area last week that caused him to raise the issue.
“The man said they had to shut up their house because of the diesel fumes,” Goad said.
Goad said after complaints over the years about fumes from idling locomotives, Galesburg Terminal Superintendent Rick Danielson agreed not to allow freights to park south of Walsh Avenue, the southern boundary of Hawthorne Centre. However, according to Goad, when BNSF has a particularly long train, “they have to come down further (south).”
While he said these occasions are rare, “There have been more and more of those rare occasions even before the flooding.”
The floods, though, really brought the issue back to the forefront.
Goad said he was pleased with Danielson’s response. Danielson sent an e-mail to City Manager Dane Bragg on July 4 and asked Bragg to share it with council members.
The terminal superintendent acknowledged the inconvenience caused for residents in the area of Morton Avenue.
“Train traffic on this line will continue to be heavier than normal for at least a month until all routes south of Quincy are opened back up,” Danielson wrote. “I appreciate everyone’s patience with the situation — we will do our best to hold trains back out of the residential areas as much as possible. There are going to be times when trains could be waiting in this area until we have a route to move the train.”
BNSF spokesman Steve Forsberg explained during a phone interview Tuesday that a major problem was the east-west line through southern Iowa, which he is a high-volume route.
According to a service advisory dated July 3 from John Lanigan, the railroad’s vice president and chief marketing officer, trains between Chicago and Denver — via Galesburg — crews completed work July 2 to reopen tracks on that line just east of Burlington.
“The difficulty, of course, is when you have a route out of service for a couple of weeks, you have a tremendous backlog,” Forsberg said. “It takes you a while to get back to a normal service schedule.”
Trains from routes out of service were detoured and added to congestion on lines that could still be used.
“In our case, that prompted us, not just in Galesburg … to hold trains idling much longer in locations than we would have done normally,” Forsberg said.
Other cities experienced the same situation. Forsberg said that there were so many trains being sent through BNSF routes in the suburban Minneapolis area “we would exhaust our pool of train crews.”
He said there were at least 15 trains stopped and idling in that area at one point “that we didn’t have train crews for.”
Forsberg said Galesburg has been at the center of effort to keep freight moving.
“Certainly Galesburg was the command center,” he said, thanking the employees, as well as the understanding of city officials and the community during the crisis. “Galesburg played a critical role in us keeping operations moving.”
Goad sent an e-mail to Danielson on Monday, thanking him for the information and expressing his appreciation for BNSF being a “vital part” of the community. In the e-mail, Goad asked if locomotives could be turned off instead of left idling.
“If the locomotives would be turned off, I think it would eliminate almost every complaint (about the trains) I have received since becoming the alderman for the area,” Goad wrote.
In an e-mail to The Register-Mail Tuesday afternoon, Goad said he had not yet received a response to that suggestion.