(The following article by Rich Exner was posted on the Cleveland Plain Dealer website on October 28.)
CLEVELAND — Outlaws like Jesse James, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid made railroad police a necessity.
Without a sheriff anywhere near much of the new track across the Wild West of the late 1800s, there was no one to protect cargo from the next great train robbery unless the railroads did it themselves.
So the railroads hired enforcers. Sometimes they were called detectives; sometimes special agents. They gained full policing authority and their ranks grew.
As late as World War II, there were 9,000 railroad police officers across the United States and Canada.
The need for such officers diminished after the wilderness became more populated. But railroad police haven’t disappeared. There still are about 2,300 nationally, including 40 certified in Ohio.
“We’re a pretty well-kept secret,” said Norfolk Southern’s Larry Schuck, special agent in charge of a multistate railroad police district headquartered in Cleveland. “When you tell people where you work, they say they didn’t know railroads had policemen.”
On Wednesday, railroad police and state and local law enforcement officials rode the rail from Cleveland to Ashtabula to raise awareness of the dangers that can be created when a 60 mph, mile-long train encounters a person or car on the tracks.
Such trains need a mile or more to stop.
“If the engineer sees you and has to go into emergency, the engineer is not going to stop” in time, said Shel Senek, head of the nonprofit organization Ohio Operation Lifesaver, which organized Wednesday’s event.
Railroad police not only participate in such public awareness programs, they write tickets and file charges just like other officers.
But, unlike the other officers, they aren’t public employees. They are hired and paid by the railroads.
Their directive: protect the tracks, trains and cargo. They’re on special lookout for thieves and trespassers.
“Most people don’t understand railroads’ tracks are not public property,” Schuck said.
Last year, 24 people were killed by trains in Ohio, and 38 the year before. About half the deaths occurred in accidents at public railroad crossings and about half involved pedestrians trespassing along the tracks.
A couple of years ago in Akron, a 9-year-old boy lost portions of both legs when he got caught under a slow-moving train as he walked along the tracks, Senek said.
Schuck, a 23-year railroad police veteran, said a typical day for a railroad police might start with the arrest of a trespasser, and then “maybe a half-hour from then we are investigating someone who broke into a train and stole alcohol.”
On Tuesday, Norfolk Southern discovered the theft of four or five cases of automotive cleaners after a freight train from Detroit arrived in Maple Heights, said Bobby Bland, police supervisor for the Cleveland area. The thieves apparently broke into 17 railroad cars while the train was en route before finding something to steal.
A couple of a years ago, about 200 pairs of shoes were stolen from a train on the East Side of Cleveland, he said. Some of the Nike shoes were found in weeds along the tracks, but the theft went unsolved, Bland said.
As for a modern-day Jesse James, Schuck said he hasn’t yet come across someone that famous.