(The following story by Tom Lochner appeared on the Contra Costa Times website on March 25.)
RICHMOND, Calif. — City housing officials plan to make good on an old plan to erect a robust fence between an apartment complex and a busy rail corridor where at least three people have been hit by trains in the past six years, including one last month.
Manuel Rosario, deputy director of the Richmond Housing Authority, said a contract will go out to bid soon for a tall, wrought-iron fence at the Triangle Court Apartments.
The 98-unit apartment complex is wedged between the Burlington Northern Santa Fe and Union Pacific rights-of-way at the northern tip of the city’s Iron Triangle district.
A 6-foot-high chain-link fence with lots of missing sections is all that separates the complex from the Union Pacific tracks these days. A fence alongside the elevated Burlington Northern Santa Fe tracks is in much better shape.
A 5-foot-wide gap where the two fences converge offers unimpeded access to the Union Pacific tracks.
A small but steady stream of pedestrians and bicyclists was observed one recent afternoon traveling the Union Pacific right of way as a shortcut between the Iron Triangle and North Richmond or San Pablo. A well-trodden trail leads through a grassy area from the fence gap into the apartment complex.
On Feb. 11, a 28-year-old man was critically injured on this section of Union Pacific tracks when he went through a fence opening at Triangle Court and was hit by an Amtrak train, police said.
Almost six years earlier, in June 1998, 13-year-old Ramon Roy died when he was hit by a train at roughly the same spot on the same right of way.
In early 1999, Steven Taron, 48, was struck and killed by an Amtrak train at virtually the same spot.
In 1998, several months after Ramon’s death, Richmond Housing Authority officials said they were applying for a federal Department of Housing and Urban Development grant to erect an 1,800-foot-long, wrought-iron fence to separate the Triangle Court complex from the tracks.
But the grant never came through, Rosario said, and now the city will undertake the project on its own.