(The following story by Stephen Deere and Tim O’Neil appeared on the St. Louis Post-Dispatch website on March 5, 2009.)
UNION, Mo. — As far down the railroad line as Robert Persefield can see, empty coal hoppers are parked on the track. Some have been there for months.
The train cars are just a few yards behind the family home, on Timber Drive in the northwest part of town. The ribbon of silver and yellow runs for about three miles.
“We don’t like it at all,” Persefield, 28, said of their backyard view of tall, cold steel.
The Union Pacific Railroad, which owns the line through town, has been using it to store cars. What the Persefields consider unpleasant scenery is, to Union Pacific, a convenient dead-end track for indefinite storage.
Nationally, railroads have been mothballing cars and locomotives as their business throttles down with the lurching economy. Union Pacific, a railroad with a major presence in St. Louis, has stored away about 48,000 of the 421,000 cars used on its line, and 1,200 of its 7,200 locomotives. The cars are scattered on sidings and yards along 32,000 miles of track in 23 states.
Burlington Northern Santa Fe, another big railroad running through St. Louis, has stored away 35,000 of 200,000 cars it uses. It has parked 700 of its 6,800 locomotives.
Mark Davis, spokesman for Union Pacific, said business was down 12 percent during the last three months of 2008 compared to the last quarter of 2007. Hardest-hit was automobile carrying, down 26 percent, followed by drops in orders to haul steel, lumber and chemicals.
Of little comfort to Persefield’s family is that coal hauling is down only 1 percent, a function of America’s desire to keep the lights on. But Davis said the track qualifies as storage, and the string of cars there is being kept for another day.
“There’s really no set time for any of these cars,” said Davis, who works at Union Pacific’s headquarters in Omaha. “As soon as demand is up, the cars move again.”
The line through Union works for the railroad because it’s a surviving stretch of the old Rock Island Railroad, which went bankrupt in 1975 and stopped running in 1980. Union Pacific keeps tracks along the Rock Island line from St. Louis to Owensville, Mo., 30 miles west of Union, but hasn’t shuttled cars west of Union for years.
That makes it a long dead end, with storage space aplenty.
Davis and Steve Forsberg, spokesman for BNSF in Kansas City, Kan., said most of the mothballed cars are cubbyholed most anywhere the railroads have idle track.
Many of Persefield’s neighbors don’t seem to mind. Union city administrator Russell Rost said the cars have been stored along the old line for six or so months, growing in number in recent weeks. But he said City Hall has received no complaints, other than about a locomotive that ran its engine overnight in town last weekend.
Jim Kimbler, a neighbor of Persefield, has a simple solution: “We just ignore them.”