SALT LAKE CITY — This is the scene Union Pacific wants America to see: a three-engine freight train snaking silently through Utah’s empty redrock country, according to the Salt Lake Tribune.
“Thirty-three thousand miles of timber and steel. From Portland to New Orleans. From Los Angles to Chicago. And the beauty of a land that spans half a continent,” says the narrator in a new national ad campaign. “It’s been said that in those 33,000 miles of rail, you can feel America’s pulse.”
Fortunately for UP’s corporate image, the commercial stops before the train pulls into Salt Lake City. Otherwise cameras might have caught Mayor Rocky Anderson in early March blasting the Omaha, Neb.-based company as “terrible corporate citizens” for opening a dormant line that slices through the heart a west-side neighborhood.
Or they might have focused on a steady stream of grade schoolers trotting down the sidewalk toward Salt Lake City’s west-side Parkview Elementary, whose playgrounds start at the edge of that controversial UP rail right-of-way.
On a recent drizzly Wednesday, the kids streamed across the rails on a sidewalk that has no gate to block pedestrian access — the crossing arms only reach over the roadway.
Only a couple of dozen feet from the clusters of kids rolling down the sidewalk, a UP crew was busy reinforcing the tracks to handle faster, heavier loads. People and railroad tracks are a messy mix. That’s why UP workers protected themselves with bright orange vests and yellow hard hats.
The kids were armed only with their 7- and 8-year-old wits.
“If I were a parent of one of those kids, it would be really tough,” says school district attorney Cullen Battle. “I’d be walking them to school every day.”
On this particular stretch of UP’s 33,000 miles of track, you can feel more than a pulse. Blood pressures are raging.
“We’re viewed basically as a nuisance,” concedes UP spokesman John Bromley. “I’ve been struggling over this for a number of years, and it’s becoming an increasing problem.”
Bromley says it is not that his 140-year-old company is doing business any differently. It’s just that the railroad industry is doing more business in an increasingly crowded America. Nationwide, that means more complaints about horns, more grumbles about trains blocking street intersections and more people wondering why they must endure the dangers inherent in moving countless tons of freight — some of it hazardous — through their neighborhoods. Bromley says the railroads aren’t alone in suffering from the NIMBY (not in my backyard) syndrome.
“It’s shared by hog farms and airports and any other so-called dirty industry,” he says. “Everybody wants the economic benefits of cheap transport, as long as it’s not near them.”
Problem is, hog farms don’t stretch across 33,000 miles, and runways don’t span half a continent.
The image problem extends to railroads across the country, and it won’t go away anytime soon. The federal government has long made it a priority to keep the freight flowing unfettered. Last month, for example, the federal Surface Transportation Board said it was aware of the “safety, traffic and quality-of-life concerns” from the neighbors of the 900 South line whose walls rattle under the weight of the 100-car trains — but tough.
“They do not outweigh the overriding federal interest in maintaining this line as part of the interstate rail network,” the board ruled.
“The 900 South [issue] is something we felt we had to do as a logical business decision. It’s unpleasant for all of us,” says Bromley. “We certainly can sympathize with the neighbors and the mayor.”
Parkview principal Janine Smith says the company has been cooperative. It has brought in people to lecture kids about rail safety and has provided a crossing guard at one of the three intersections students use. Smith also anticipates safer crossing barriers will be installed to protect kids from trains that will run 30 mph in an area where cars are only allowed to go 20 mph.
Still, she says she was “devastated” by the news the line would be reopened next to her playgrounds.
Bromley says the company is looking at the crossings, but asks, “If a gate is down and a bell is ringing and lights are flashing, what else are you obligated to do? That doesn’t mean it won’t be done.”
“It appears what we are seeing is the bare minimum that is required by federal law,” school district attorney Battle says.
That doesn’t surprise him, but he wishes the Utah Department of Transportation had done more early on to demand safer kid crossings. Battle says UDOT can mandate stricter safety measures. UDOT says it can only recommend them.
“Union Pacific is just doing what comes naturally to them,” says Battle. “Their job is to run the railroad.”
They do it quite well. Corporate reports show the company had a net income in 2001 of $966 million.
Bromley says the company’s public relations problems began brewing after Union Pacific stopped its passenger service in the early 1970s.
“We’ve lost a lot of touch with the public. So people don’t really see a direct benefit from the railroad in their personal lives,” he says.
Indeed, people who live near the tracks tend not to dwell on the fact that they have trains to thank for delivering automobiles to their dealerships, newsprint to their newspapers or coal to their power plants.
They think about the noise.
“When one train goes by and toots the horn, that’s not bad. I kind of enjoy it,” says Salt Lake City’s Jon Robinson, who lives near the corner of North Temple and 600 West, about a block from a UP line. “But every now and then you get an engineer who basically lays on the horn from the time he leaves the yard to well past hearing range. It’s just obnoxious. It is unbelievable they would do that.”
Bromley says UP operates in 23 states, each of which has its own horn-blowing requirements. He says the company has decided to mandate horn blowing to meet the strictest state’s standards. That means horns should get blown constantly from one quarter of a mile before a train enters an intersection. And that means rough nights for people such as Jeanette Gonzalez, who lives next to the 900 South tracks.
“By the time you have to get up for work, you’re just barely falling asleep from the last train,” she says.
Then there are the trains that stop on the tracks, snarling traffic and cutting off neighborhoods from their nearest ambulance and fire service. Salt Lake City law prohibits stalled trains from blocking intersections for more than five minutes unless it is an emergency, but busting an engineer requires a stopwatch and watchful cop.
“It’s difficult to enforce,” says Tim Harpst, Salt Lake City’s transportation director.
There are other complaints specific to Utah. Some, for example, fret over the harm they believe the UP causeway has inflicted on the Great Salt Lake. Constructed in the late 1950s and fortified during the high-water years of the 1980s, the causeway has literally cut the lake in half.
Salinity levels of the lake’s south arm have plummeted because that is where most tributaries enter the lake. Salt levels in the north, meanwhile, have skyrocketed. The lake’s brine shrimp have suffered, and that could ultimately wreak havoc on birds — and shrimpers — who live off the lake.
A 300-foot breach was carved out of the causeway in the 1980s and recently the state spent about $800,000 to expand its depth to increase flows. UP also installed two massive culverts to facilitate flow between the two sides, but those have become plugged.
The result is trouble for the lake.
“If they realize they are creating a problem, you’d think they would fix it,” says Bill Hanewinkel, a board member of Friends of the Great Salt Lake. “They just don’t want to spend the money.”
Bromley says tearing the causeway down would probably lead to double the train traffic through Salt Lake City, which is “something I don’t think would be pleasantly welcomed by Mayor Anderson.”
Pleasant welcomes are getting harder to come by for the railroad, despite the fact that UP has, according to Bromley, given about $2.2 million to Utah charities in the past five years.
That is not what is on the mind of Michael Clara, an activist, west-side resident and ardent opponent of the reopened 900 South line.
When he thinks of UP, he thinks of a bunch of “liars.” He insists UP promised it would permanently close the line at community meetings held a few years back. UP denies it.
Despite the recent news media coverage of the matter, UP brass say the new ad campaign is “absolutely not” tied to company controversies in Utah, where more than 1,600 company employees live.
“Our board of directors challenged us to get the word out to explain what’s happening in UP today, and get more visibility for the company,” explains Kathryn Blackwell, general director of corporate communications.
Poplar Grove residents feel they have a pretty good idea already.
Disgusted by UP’s actions in his largely Latino neighborhood, at a recent community meeting Clara presented to UP a thawed turkey with a UP logo stuck between its drumsticks.
Why?
“They’re just raw white turkeys,” he says.
“They’re not very polite when we talk to them,” he adds. “But then we’re not, either.”
Bromley has grown accustomed to such heated exchanges, if not weary: “It’s going to get harder and harder.”