(The following story by Gabrielle Finley appeared on The Lakeland Ledger website on May 9.)
LAKELAND, Fla. — CSX railroad officials said Tuesday that a series of “unusual circumstances” caused a freight train to stall in downtown Lakeland on Monday afternoon and block traffic.
The train, weighing about 13,775 tons, halted traffic at some of the city’s busiest intersections for an hour and a half, Lakeland police said.
The nearly mile-long train stretched from just west of North Florida Avenue to Ingraham Avenue, Lakeland police said.
Pedestrians pressed their luck and risked injury by climbing between the train’s cars to get to the streets on other side of the track.
“We apologize for the inconvenience to the community,” said CSX spokesman Gary Sease.
The train was traveling from Miami to Wildwood on Monday, hauling 105 cars loaded with rocks, when the train’s conductor and engineer were notified about faulty crossing gates in Lakeland, CSX spokeswoman Meg Sacks said.
“We have a rule that if crossing arms aren’t properly functioning the engineer will stop the train,” Sacks said from her Jacksonville office.
Sacks didn’t know Tuesday which intersection had the faulty crossing gates.
The engineer stopped the train before the crossing, then the conductor got out to make sure traffic had stopped, Sacks said.
After traffic stopped, the engineer was given the OK to proceed through the crossing, Sacks said. But the engineer noticed a problem when trying to restart the train.
One of the train’s two locomotives had broken down, and the still-working locomotive did not have enough power to pull the heavy train up a small incline, Sacks said.
Another locomotive was sent to replace the failed one, which accounted for most of the time traffic was blocked, Sease said.
The train finally moved on, but it created a backlog of other trains that needed to use the track through Lakeland.
A city of Lakeland code regulates how long a train can block traffic, depending on the number of cars in the train.
In this instance, the CSX train violated the code, which allows 15 minutes for a train to block a street if it consists of more than 100 cars.
But because the train’s malfunction was “beyond the control of the operator,” CSX will not be cited for the violation, city of Lakeland spokesman Kevin Cook said.