AKRON, Ohio — One might think a $100 traffic ticket to a millionaire amounts to a cheap lunch in Paris, reports the Akron Beacon Journal.
But not to the folks at the Wheeling & Lake Erie Railway Co. in Brewster.
For almost four years, they’ve battled the Village of Spencer — population 747 — over a citation given one of its trains accused of blocking traffic for nine minutes.
The case has been fought twice in Medina Municipal Court and twice in Ohio’s 9th District Court of Appeals.
Yesterday, the appellate court sided with the railroad, reversing a lower court judge who issued the $100 fine.
W&LE Railway, with about 800 miles of track in Ohio and Pennsylvania, employs 390 people and makes about $45 million a year in gross revenue.
“It’s the principle,” said Cleveland attorney Joseph J. Santoro, who along with a second lawyer represented the privately held rail line.
The traffic case goes back to August 1998 when Spencer police officer Eugene Rice was stopped in traffic by a passing W&LE train at the intersection of state routes 162 and 301.
The officer noted that the train did not move for three minutes and that traffic was backed up more than 600 feet in each direction.
Once the train began to roll again, Rice reported that it took another six minutes for the last rail car to clear the intersection.
The officer cited the rail line for obstruction of roads by a railroad because the delay was in excess of the state limit of five minutes.
In October 1998, Municipal Court Judge Dale Chase tossed out the case, citing federal law regulations that override state railroad laws.
The village appealed the case to the 9th District Court of Appeals and in 2000, judges reversed Chase’s ruling and sent the case back to Medina.
The rail line was subsequently fined $100 and appealed the decision back to the appellate court.
In a unanimous three-judge decision, the railroad was found not to have violated Ohio law when it delayed traffic.
Spencer attorney Gregory A. Huber had argued that the train broke the law when it blocked traffic for nine minutes in all.
But Appellate Judge Donna Carr wrote in her ruling that the statute exempts continuously moving trains. In essence, she wrote, the train was stopped for only three minutes and was moving through the intersection for the next six minutes and thus did not violate the law.
“The amount of time that elapsed from the time the train began moving again… is irrelevent,” Carr wrote in a 3-0 decision.
Huber could not be reached for comment.
William Callison, W&LE’s vice president of law and government, said the rail line is cited two or three times a year for blocking traffic.
But, he said, the railroad took on this fight because fines have since been raised to $1,000 and “the (municipal) court ruling was so incredible, given the precedent it would have established.”
“The bottom line is, if we’re stopped for three minutes and begin moving again and if it takes more than five minutes to clear the intersection, we could get ticketed,” he said. “It not a good precedent and not good logic.”