(The following column by Ronnie Polaneczky appeared on the Philadelphia Daily News website on May 31.)
PHILADELPHIA — FILE this one under “B” for “Bogus.”
For years now, rail-freight behemoth CSX Transportation Inc. has said it would be too dangerous to allow Philly pedestrians to cross its tracks to get to the new Schuylkill River Park.
People could get hit by a train, it said, or be killed clambering between parked rail cars to get to the river.
CSX would prefer big, expensive bridges over its tracks, complicating access to what has, almost overnight, become a lovely, riverfront people magnet.
“This is about public safety,” CSX spokesman Bob Sullivan has said, ad nauseum. “We will never compromise when it comes to saving lives.”
Except CSX’s past actions in its home state of Florida sure seem at odds with what the company swears is needed in Philly to keep us safe.
For starters, CSX has a much-used rail line that intersects a recreation trail right near its corporate headquarters in Jacksonville. Pedestrians can cross those tracks; an electronic arm simply stops crossers while trains pass.
Meanwhile, a few miles north of Jacksonville in Baldwin, Fla., CSX has for years actually created dangerous conditions by idling its trains across city streets, officials there say.
All of which leads me to two conclusions:
The first is that CSX enjoys throwing into peril the good people living in its own back yard.
The second is that CSX’s wailing about safety in Philadelphia is bogus, and that this dispute is simply about corporate convenience.
I’m leaning toward – if you’ll pardon the term – No. 2.
Schuylkill River Park is actually a wide, landscaped pathway that hugs the bank of the Schuylkill from the rear of the Art Museum to Locust Street.
Running parallel to the park are the tracks owned by CSX, whose 23,000 miles of rails slice the East Coast. On the tracks’ other side, separated by a fence, is Center City’s western border.
To get to the park, many people use fence openings at Race and Locust streets, which dead-end at the river after crossing those CSX tracks.
In CSX’s ideal world, those openings would be sealed, replaced by bridges over the tracks.
In the city’s world, they’d remain usable, and not just for convenience’s sake.
Sealing off street access would keep police and rescue vehicles from getting to the path in an emergency, park advocates say. Nor could users in trouble exit the path to find help along Center City’s busy streets.
By January, CSX and the city were at a legal impasse about the entrances, and a judge asked them to negotiate a settlement.
As recently as early this month it looked like sanity might prevail.
CSX had agreed to maintain street access at Race, and the city had agreed to the installation of an electronic gate, one far more impervious to track-crossers than the system in place along that Jacksonville trail.
(To see Jacksonville’s gate, go to www. freetheriverpark.org, scroll down to “Jacksonville,” then click on the link. The soundtrack alone is worth the trouble.)
But CSX stayed adamant that the Locust entry be replaced by a million-plus-dollar pedestrian bridge. Who would pay for that has not been determined.
Why not compromise?
Because CSX trains need to be parked along that stretch for hours at a time.
“It could not be kept unblocked in all but extraordinary circumstances without major and costly changes in CSX’s operations,” wrote CSX attorney Benjamin Dunlap in a letter to the city.
“Furthermore, CSX remains extremely concerned about the dangers of pedestrians crawling between the cars of a stopped train, even with gates or moveable fences.”
But, like I said, I don’t put much stock in CSX’s claim of safety worries, for a two-word reason:
Marvin Godbold.
He’s the mayor of Baldwin, Fla., a tiny burg just down the tracks from a CSX railyard. More than 50 trains rumble through it each day.
The noise is annoying, but what steams Godbold most is that CSX routinely idles its trains across the only two roads through Baldwin – cutting off one side of the town from the other, sometimes for 90 minutes or more, jamming traffic for miles.
“No one can get in or out,” Godbold told me.
Fire Chief Bill Clute worries more about Baldwin’s safety.
“One house burned to the ground before we could get to it,” he said. “So did a car.”
And one resident in cardiac arrest was helped not by a Baldwin ambulance, but by one from the next town over, said Clute, who worries that, one day, someone will die while waiting for help.
Godbold’s plea that CSX move its trains more quickly has fallen on deaf ears, he said. He’s even issued conductors $200 citations for violating traffic ordinances, which CSX has fought.
“What’s $200 to them?” he said. “They’re a multimillion-dollar corporation.”
CSX’s Sullivan told me he hadn’t heard about Baldwin’s years-long troubles but would look into it.
Because, you know, the company is concerned about safety.
The truth is, CSX is concerned first and foremost with ease of company operations.
And when that’s threatened, as it is with Schuylkill River Park, it plays the safety card for all it’s worth.
If that weren’t so, it would have forbidden the crossing in Jacksonville – used by its own employees, by the way – and it’d take seriously the fears of Baldwin.
Two weeks ago, discussions between CSX and the city completely broke down, and both sides asked the federal court to help negotiate a compromise they can live with.
I can’t see it happening until CSX admits that its safety concerns are just bogus.
They’re cynical beyond words.
And you can file that one under “C.”