(The following story by Krisy Gashler appeared on the Ithaca Journal website on July 5.)
ITHACA, N.Y. — It’s not uncommon for trains to idle next to Nate’s Floral Estates trailer park for four days at a time.
“Four days and four nights,” said Alderwoman Maria Coles, D-1st, who represents the residents of Nate’s. “It’s not atypical.”
It’s a much bigger problem in the winter. When the weather drops below 40 degrees, the trains are idled until it gets warmer because if they turn the engines off, the diesel fuel “gels up” and the water in the engines freezes, said Rudy Husband, a spokesman for Norfolk Southern, the company that owns the rail yard that borders Nate’s.
About a year ago, Coles organized a meeting with Mayor Carolyn Peterson, Assembly-woman Barbara Lifton, D-125th, and Norfolk Southern.
At the time, representatives from the railroad promised to extend their service road so engineers could idle the trains farther south, instead of right next to Nate’s. There were ideas about the railroad building a facility somewhere else in the state to store trains so they don’t have to idle them so much, Coles said.
They promised that within a year, idling trains in the city would go down 50 percent, she said.
Nate’s residents contacted by The Journal said the problem is not much better. But nobody wanted to have their name in the paper for fear of backlash from people who’d say it’s their own fault for living next door to a rail yard.
Husband said that’s an unfortunate reality of living near the trains.
“This trailer park is adjacent to a rail yard. And in rail yards you’re going to have railroad operations,” he said. “And occasionally we’re going to have engines that idle in rail yards. There’s no getting around that.”
The promised extension of the service road, which would move the idling trains a little farther from the homes at Nate’s, has not happened, Coles said.
“Quite frankly, the railroad has promised things that they have not done. Over and over again,” she said.
But extending the service road won’t solve the problem, it’ll just move it, Husband argued.
“Wherever we put the engines, whether it’s south of the yard or up towards Lansing, we get complaints,” he said. “The bottom line is that we are going to keep the engines in the yard, since that is one of the reasons the yard is there.”
When possible, engineers do idle the trains at the southernmost end of the rail yard, where they affect fewer homes, Husband said.
Coles said this has helped.
“I know of at least 10 homes now that don’t have the same trouble that they used to have before now,” she said.
Nate’s sits off Cecil A. Malone Drive behind Wegmans.
It’s also the northern border of the area proposed by the city for a new Southwest urban neighborhood.
The neighborhood will sit near the tracks but farther south of the rail yard itself, where the trains idle, Coles said.
Even so, Husband wasn’t thrilled with the idea of adding housing along railroad tracks.
“Basically people are going to move next to railroad tracks and then complain about trains,” he said.
Peterson said with the price of gas being what it is, it’s likely that transportation by train will increase — something she said she’s “generally be supportive of.”
But she wondered how that increase would impact Nate’s residents and future residents of the mixed-income Southwest neighborhood.
“What methodologies can be used?” she asked. “Should they be asked to build some kind of a building so they don’t have to idle the trains?”
“If the city is interested in building us that kind of structure, we would certainly entertain sitting down with the city to discuss the details,” Husband responded. “But there should not be any expectation whatsoever that Norfolk Southern would contribute any money for that construction.”