ORLANDO, Fla. — Twinkies and beer, it turns out, do a remarkably good job of blocking traffic. Of course, anything packed in a mile-long freight train stops traffic. Just ask Central Florida drivers, the Orlando Sentinel reported.
About a dozen times a day, their trips through Winter Park, Orlando and other parts of urban Orange County are halted by engines and freight cars rumbling across the region’s urban midsection.
Those trains, hauling everything from coal to auto parts — and even the spongy snack cakes — can shut down an intersection for five minutes or more. Over the course of an entire day, that’s nothing. But to commuters hurrying to work or racing to pick up a child at day care, it’s an eternity.
“It is so inconvenient,” said Beth Holliman, a probation officer who often finds her route home blocked by a string of tanker cars, gondolas and flatbeds. “Sometimes it seems like we’re there for 10 or 15 minutes.”
For 20 years, there have been sporadic calls to move train traffic out of downtown Orlando, but the effort has never picked up steam. It’s a great idea, officials say, but no one has been willing to take on the tab, which could top $400 million.
Now, however, Orange County Chairman Rich Crotty has appointed a 21-member committee to find a way to get traffic moving in car-clogged Central Florida. And while most of his proposal focuses on bigger and better roads, it’s also raising the question of what to do with the freight tracks that run right through the heart of downtown.
Crotty has sketched out a sweeping plan to widen Interstate 4 to as many as 12 lanes, rebuild and modify its major interchanges and widen other major arteries such as State Road 50. But another part of the plan almost certainly will involve passenger-rail service.
One kind of rail, known as light rail, could cost more than $1 billion and require its own set of tracks. But a second — and far cheaper — option is being pushed by U.S. Rep. John Mica, R-Winter Park: diesel-powered commuter-rail cars running on the freight tracks. Mica has said he can get a system operating in less than two years for $50 million.
The snag in the plan is that CSX Transportation, which owns the rails, would have to agree to lease them for commuter trains — and move some, or all, of the freight trains to a late-night schedule or another set of tracks. And railroad officials have been clear about one thing: Money to do all this won’t come from them.
“We’re happy to talk about it,” said Steve Crosby, president of real property for CSX. “But it’s got to be studied and paid for by public-policy makers.”
Moving trains from downtown would involve upgrading old tracks and building new ones. There would be property to buy and schedule changes that could send disruptions rippling across CSX’s 23,000-mile rail network.
It could be done, of course. But local leaders and the community face some perplexing math. Are the trains so troublesome that it’s worth the price and upheaval of getting them out of downtown?
“This is a big deal,” Crosby warned. “It’s no small undertaking.”
Today, about 12 freight trains and five passenger trains lumber through downtown every day. In contrast, about six trains a week go through the central business district of Tampa. A few roll along the edge of downtown Miami, but only between 2 and 5 a.m. None goes through the center of Jacksonville.
In Orlando, the trains cross 43 streets between Fairbanks Avenue and Michigan Street, including about 20 in the heart of downtown. They tie up traffic and, every few years, flatten a car. Safety problems, however, aren’t the reason people want trains out. Since 1992, train-auto crashes have killed four people in Orange County. Among big urban counties, that’s the fewest in the state. The county also has seen few spills of hazardous material, which accounts for less than 2 percent of local rail freight. From 1990 to 2000, there were four rail accidents involving dangerous materials. The most serious occurred when a load shifted and a 5-gallon container of cleaning fluid ruptured. Total cleanup cost: $11.
Trains block emergency vehicles once or twice a month, said Kathy Miller, an assistant fire chief in Orlando. Rather than wait for the train to pass, she said, the department sends another truck from another station to handle the call. Delay time: one minute.
In other words, the only people truly troubled by the trains are motorists trying to get across town, especially at rush hour.
Rush-hour rage
Afternoons in Orlando are the busiest for trains.
That’s when Holliman and her fellow commuters on Robinson Street most often find themselves stuck behind an iron curtain of freight. It usually happens about 4:30 p.m., just as rush hour is heating up. Two to three times a week, Holliman sits fuming in her Nissan Sentra, watching other drivers roll their eyes and bang their steering wheels.
“Amtrak trains aren’t bad,” she said, “but the freight trains seem to go on forever.”
Those diesel-powered brutes can be 100 cars long and stretch for more than a mile.
U
nder good conditions, they move at 25 mph and block crossings for 2* to 3 minutes. But if the weather’s bad or another train is lurking nearby, the freights slow to 10 mph, blocking a crossing for 6 minutes or more. Sometimes, the trains stop completely.
This drives Jillian Fraser batty.
Fraser runs Open Sky Trapeze, where she teaches students to fly like circus acrobats. Her business is in the Orlando Watersports Complex, just off Landstreet Road in south Orange County — close to the big Taft rail yard, where long-haul trains first go when they arrive in Orlando.
Fraser gets caught a couple of times a week at one of the three sets of tracks she has to cross to get to work. Sometimes, she said, the delay is 15 minutes.
“It’s like the triple whammy,” she said. “If you make it past one, chances are you’ll get stuck at the other two. I always keep a book in the car for just that reason.”
Taft handles many trains
Only two types of freight trains roll through Orlando: long-haul and locals.
Long-haul trains bring merchandise from around the country to the Taft rail yard. They’re loaded with beer from Mexico, lumber from Canada, corn from the Midwest and, sometimes, tankers with 20,000 gallons of cooking oil. At Taft, the cars are reassembled into shorter, local trains that make deliveries to Central Florida customers.
Think of the tracks through Orlando as the skeleton of a fish. The mainline spine to Taft runs north and south. Other tracks angle off to reach factories and warehouses, many in north Orlando.
CSX customers include Exxon, which gets plastics and petroleum products; Winn-Dixie, canned goods and produce; 84 Lumber, boards and plywood; and Florida Power Corp., coal. Two coal trains a day also go to power the Orlando Utilities Commission’s Curtis Stanton Power Plant in east Orange.
All told, about 6 million tons of freight rolls into Orlando annually, while 400,000 tons is exported. If you lined up the freight cars that pass through the city each year — about 136,000 — they would reach from Orlando to Maine.
Rail executives say the trains actually benefit motorists, pointing out that the freight would otherwise come by truck. Each boxcar or tanker carries the equivalent of three or four 18-wheelers.
“And I guarantee you, 90 percent of those trucks would be using I-4,” Crosby said. The economy of scale freight trains offer is also important to customers. Consider Conrad Yelvington, a distributor of gravel, granite and other rock.
Yelvington has a distribution center just south of downtown. Three days a week, 50 hoppers loaded with rock pull in. On the other four days, the shipment can be anywhere from five to 20 cars. Each car carries about 103 tons.
Plant Operations Manager Buck Bays wouldn’t disclose figures, but he said to bring in the same amount by truck would be “a major dollar difference.”
“The freight trains are what do it for us,” he said.
Rail jump-started Orlando
Before automobiles swept over America, cities grew up around their rail lines. Trains moved goods and people, so a busy railroad meant a prosperous community. Rail gave a city cachet, signaling it was moving into the modern age.
Orlando was no different.
The railroad first arrived in 1880 — free whiskey was handed out at the groundbreaking ceremony — igniting a population and business boom. Hundreds of Northerners descended on Orlando, which saw its population jump from 200 to 1,600 in four years. The rail lines gave citrus growers a way to get their fruit to market before it spoiled and helped establish Winter Park, Longwood and Altamonte Springs as winter resorts.
But in time, the car emerged as people’s vehicle of choice. Rail still carried the goods of everyday life — as it does today — but it lost its connection with the public as passenger service withered. Freight trains went from community asset to community nemesis.
Cities have complained about trains for decades, but few in the past 30 years have found the money or political willpower to move them.
An exception is Lafayette, a city in Indiana, which spent the past 30 years working to move 50 trains a day out of downtown. In 2001, the job was done. The price: $182.5 million, with nearly 85 percent paid by the federal government.
Cities that want to try the same trick need to prepare for a marathon, said Elizabeth Solberg, who ran the Lafayette project for 15 years.
“It’s not worth starting if you’re not in it for the long haul,” she said.
Other places would like to follow Lafayette’s lead. Some have even suggested digging trenches and lowering the rail lines.Last year, Sen. Trent Lott, R-Mississippi, sponsored a $2.25 billion proposal to help cities relocate rail lines. The bill got stuck in committee. In Orlando, nobody knows for sure what it might cost to move the freight traffic, because no one has studied it in detail. Crotty said recently, however, that moving freight out of downtown “needs to be considered.”
As the region was considering whether to build light rail through downtown in 1999, consultants looked at shifting some freight traffic to a CSX line west of Orlando.
The so-called “S” line runs from Jacksonville through Wildwood, Lakeland and Haines City before turning back north to reach the Taft yard. It’s about 90 miles longer than the line CSX trains now use.
Consultants concluded it would cost about $93 million to upgrade tracks, sidings and switches so trains could use the “S” line. Add the cost of dealing with environmental issues, building bridges, buying property and laying new track, and the price tag likely would top $300 million.
A University of Central Florida poll, meanwhile, suggests that blocked street crossings aren’t such a big deal to most people. Only 13 percent of respondents said they were regularly inconvenienced by train traffic. For officials with the region’s lead transportation agency, those results suggest commuters have other worries.
“I think we’ve got plenty of projects to occupy ourselves right now,” said Dave Grovdahl, chief planner for transportation-planning agency Metroplan Orlando. Relocating freight is “not one I’d want to push.”
The city of Orlando isn’t interested either. Though downtown would be the biggest winner if the freight lines were moved, the city doesn’t want to pay for it.
Orlando Mayor Glenda Hood supports studying what it would take to relocate freight — the region’s transit agency is already doing that — but she doesn’t think the project is on the A-list of many people.
“I’ve not received one call about this,” she said.
In coming years, however, freight trains may become more than simply annoying. CSX expects its business to grow, and Orlando traffic is destined to become more snarled.
By 2005, Orange County is expected to have more than 1 million residents. By 2015, it could be the state’s fourth-largest county. The minor train delays of today could grow to the monster backups of tomorrow.
Ultimately, many officials say, the freight trains probably will be moved. Crotty said his committee will consider more thoroughly than ever before whether freight should be shifted out of downtown, or whether the problem could be eased by building underpasses or overpasses, particularly at downtown crossings. The committee also will look at rescheduling some freight trains to hours when traffic is the least busy.
A way to get federal dollars
The best chance for moving freight may come if local leaders decide to run commuter rail through Orlando. Already, Mica has secured about $8 million in federal money. He plans to bring a demonstration train to the area this month so local leaders can examine it.
At first, the service would be just a few trains in the morning and evening from Volusia County to downtown Orlando. But if it were popular and local officials wanted to expand, they would have to look at relocating at least some freight — possibly using the “S” line west of Orlando. At that point, federal lawmakers might be willing to send big money this way in the name of supporting transit.
“It’ll have to be tied to a [mass-transit] project,” Mica said. “That’s the only way.”
In the meantime, some officials are considering a half-step. They will soon meet with CSX to discuss rescheduling some freight traffic. It may be possible to run at least some of the trains later in the evening, when there are fewer cars on the road. A 1999 report suggested four to five trains a day could run after midnight.
The response from CSX: maybe. If the change wouldn’t cost the rail line any customers or muck up schedules, then some shipments could be sent at night. Others, such as UPS packages, are time-sensitive — “down to the minute,” CSX said — so the rail company has to make the deadline.
But the state won’t push that idea until it is clear that elected officials — for the first time — would be willing to pay the price. So far, they haven’t been, but that could change as Crotty’s panel begins to detail its plans.
So for Beth Holliman and Orlando’s army of commuters, that leaves two options: Relax and remember that the train blocking the way could be hauling snacks and brew, or pray a little harder to the scheduling gods.
“Sometimes, I’ll just make it through, and I’ll see the gates go down behind me,” Holliman said. “But other times, I’ll leave work just a minute or two too late. That is the worst.”