(The following story by David Patch appeared on the Toledo Blade website on August 20, 2010.)
TOLEDO, Ohio — Seventeen-year-old Franco Harris and his cousin, Jason Abranczyk, 11, thought the railroad tracks behind a friend’s house in East Toledo would be a good shortcut to head over to young Harris’ house on Miami Street Thursday afternoon.
But Chad Heiser, a Norfolk Southern Railroad police officer participating in a trespassing-awareness campaign along the tracks in Toledo Thursday, spotted them as they walked toward Fassett Street and stopped them for a little chat.
While the track that crosses Fassett near Utah Street isn’t especially busy, the railroad occasionally uses it to turn engines around at a nearby junction and to run grain trains between South Toledo and Walbridge, so the risk of getting injured exists, Mr. Heiser explained. That’s especially true for people walking between the rails, as Jason was doing, but the driveways on either side of the track also are railroad property and not open to the public, he said.
“I’m just warning you now, but if I find you on the tracks again, I will write you a ticket,” he said as he wrote the boys’ names and addresses in a notebook. “That’s $80 plus court costs, which I’m sure your parents won’t like paying.”
The encounter at Fassett was one of a handful of enforcement actions that police officers took during a two-day Trespassing Enforcement Program along Norfolk Southern’s tracks through Toledo and Holland that started on Wednesday. On the first day, railroad police visited businesses near the rail line to drop off leaflets, coloring books, and other literature that they hoped the business owners would read themselves and distribute to customers. Thursday, they patrolled near the railroad, looking out for people who didn’t belong there or responding to sightings from train crews.
Both efforts’ purpose was to discourage people from using the railroad as a shortcut, a hangout, or a play area, behaviors that expose them to danger – primarily the risk of being hit by trains, which has happened from time to time in metro Toledo. At least four pedestrians were struck and killed by trains in Lucas County last year, and another was seriously injured.
“I’ve kicked so many of them off [railroad property] doing stupid stuff,” said Tim Gillespie, another Norfolk Southern police officer, citing in particular the case of a man who posed his daughter for prom pictures on the tracks just west of the railroad’s busy bridge over the Maumee River near downtown Toledo.
Mr. Gillespie particularly worries about pedestrians or all-terrain vehicle operators who walk or drive between the rails with music playing through earphones, severely compromising their ability to hear a train rolling up from behind.
“It just baffles you how people don’t look after their own safety,” he said.
The leaflets featured a Norfolk Southern Police phone number that Pamela O’Connor, the office manager at her husband’s insurance office on McCord Road in Holland, could have used to report a man she saw standing on the tracks nearby, accompanied by two small children, one morning a few weeks ago.
“I wasn’t sure what he was going to do. Was he going to commit suicide? I wasn’t sure if I should call somebody,” she said. The trio left before a train arrived.
The McCord crossing was where two Springfield High School students were struck by an Amtrak passenger train in December when they tried to run across the tracks. Cody Brown, 15, was killed, while Brianna Mullinger, 16, lost a leg.
That accident “raised such an awareness of railroad safety in the community,” insurance agent Anthony Reau said, although Emma Stocchi, a waitress at the neighboring Al Saher Diner, said that when the crossing gates come down for a train, there are still “one or two cars” scooting across after the lights start flashing.
Rudy Husband, a Norfolk Southern spokesman, said that because the December incident occurred at a crossing, it was classified as a crossing accident rather than a trespasser incident.
But two other people were killed along the same line, about three miles to the east at the Wenz Road crossing, five days apart last July when they either jumped or sat down on the track in front of trains. A third suspected suicide-by-train occurred in May at the Holland-Sylvania Road crossing on Toledo’s border with Springfield Township.
Holland police Sgt. Todd Shelton said he intercepted a 14-year-old local girl who was driving a golf cart along the tracks west of Holloway Road on Wednesday. He warned her about being on railroad property and phoned her father to come get her.
“When school opens up, it’ll be an everyday thing” of youths using the Norfolk Southern corridor near Springfield High as a shortcut, he said, “though maybe it’ll be a little different this year because of the Cody Brown thing.”
Dan Wenz, the owner of Wenz Brothers Farm Ltd., a greenhouse complex on Wenz, said the trespassing problem near his business goes beyond kids using the tracks as a short cut. Railroad trespassers have broken his greenhouses’ windows throwing ballast rocks from the tracks.
“It’s a hundred dollars a rock. That adds up quick,” agreed Matt Brodbeck, who owns a competing greenhouse across the street, also next to the railroad.
And some of the people railroad police or local law enforcement apprehend along the tracks have more nefarious purposes, such as breaking into trains to steal cargo.
“We have arrested people with outstanding warrants,” said Gary Hedgepath, Norfolk Southern Police Department manager of facility security and crime analysis. “You just never know what you’re going to run into.”