(The following story by David Patch appeared on the Toledo Blade website on July 26.)
DEFIANCE, Ohio — A dispute over diamonds — the steel rail intersections that allow one train track to cross another — is straining the relationship between a local shortline railroad and Goliath CSX Transportation Corp.
CSX took the Maumee & Western Railroad’s diamonds away, and the Maumee & Western wants them back. The smaller company recently asked a federal agency to step in and force the issue, which has been bubbling for more than two years.
“We’d like to settle this by negotiation,” Spence Wendelin, the Maumee & Western’s president, said Friday by telephone from his office in Corydon, Ind. “But in order to have a conversation, you’ve got to have two parties at the table.”
CSX’s removal 20 months ago of the track crossing in Defiance isolated several miles of M&W track west of that junction that Mr. Wendelin said could otherwise be used for rail service. The M&W line
continues west toward Antwerp, Ohio, and Woodburn, Ind., but service over a six-mile stretch near Cecil, Ohio, is currently suspended because of poor track condition.
Maumee & Western’s July 12 petition to the federal Surface Transportation Board, which was posted on that agency’s public docket last week, seeks an order that the track crossing be restored. Furthermore, the short line asks the federal agency for authority to remove CSX’s track at the intersection, and re-lay its own, if CSX does not comply with any such restoration order.
“We are reviewing this complaint, and plan to defend our proper actions vigorously,” CSX spokesman Meg Scheu responded Friday.
The Defiance diamonds allowed Maumee & Western’s single-track line from Liberty Center, Ohio, to Woodburn, Ind., to cross a double-track CSX route between Chicago and Willard, Ohio. In letters exchanged before the crossing’s November, 2002, removal, CSX said M&W hadn’t used the diamonds for 18 months and they had become a maintenance and safety problem. CSX said it would reinstall the crossing, on 30 days’ notice, if M&W documented a need to run trains.
Mr. Wendelin on Friday disputed that the line had been dormant, contending that his company had used the crossing within 30 days of its removal. And in any event, he said, CSX needed Maumee & Western’s consent to remove the crossing because, while the CSX track is much busier, with as many as 100 trains a day, the M&W line was built first.
A connecting track between the two railroads remained in place, over which Maumee & Western and CSX exchange about 2,000 freight shipments per year, Mr. Wendelin said, so it is in the two carriers’ interest to cooperate.
“We have no desire to disrupt their system, but they need to realize that we have our own railroad to run too,” he said.
In addition to the maintenance matter CSX cited in correspondence, Mr. Wendelin theorized that the bigger railroad might also be motivated by a desire to keep Maumee & Western from building rails into an industrial park that the Defiance Community Improvement Corp., a public economic development agency, is developing on the city’s west side. But city and county officials painted a different picture on Friday, one of M&W as the party trying to obstruct the desire of a tentative industrial-park tenant to have a direct rail connection to CSX.
David Williams, the city’s law director, pointed to several lawsuits that M&W’s parent company, RMW Ventures, L.L.C., filed July 1 in Defiance County Common Pleas Court seeking to condemn a strip of land on the industrial park’s west side. The condemnation suits list rail service as the purpose for the seizures, but Mr. Williams said the strip is positioned so as to be “a wall” between the park and a strip the city was on the verge of buying to provide right-of-way for its own track that would connect to CSX.
Ideally, Mr. Williams said, the industrial park will have service from both CSX and Maumee & Western. But he said local officials’ immediate concern is to provide rail access to the large prospective tenant, whom Mr. Williams declined to identify but said has existing business relationships with CSX and specifically wants CSX access.
Mr. Wendelin did not mention the condemnation suits when interviewed about the federal proceedings, and could not be reached for further comment later Friday. The Surface Transportation Board has 120 days to act on the complaint about the diamonds, he said.
And Defiance is not the only place where Maumee & Western is involved in a rail diamond dispute. The Indiana & Ohio recently removed a crossing of M&W’s track with its own near Liberty Center. But a spokesman for the Indiana & Ohio could not be reached for comment Friday, and Mr. Wendelin declined, saying litigation is pending in that matter.