Higginson Mayor Randell Homsley is on the agenda to testify before the state House Committee on Public Transportation on Monday in Little Rock on the problems smaller cities in Arkansas are having with railroad crossings “constantly being blocked by trains.”
“We have had problems with the trains, ever since I have been mayor, blocking the crossings over here,” said Homsley, who has been in office for 18 years.
The main problem, according to Homsley, is “the lengths of the trains now has just become ridiculous. Some trains are a mile and a half, two miles long now. They are actually hooking two trains together and calling them super trains more or less and it has literally gotten to the point that small towns are bearing the brunt of the problem because I don’t know what it is, they don’t want to make larger towns mad or whatever.
“They are not set up for the infrastructure for that. They didn’t plan ahead for two trains together like that and making it work.”
This item is listed on the committee agenda as “E. Adoption and discussion of Interim Study Proposal 2021-112 by Representative Vivian Flowers, of Pine Bluff, to regulate length of a railroad train operated on a main line or branch line and to declare an emergency.” Rep. Craig Christiansen of Bald Knob serves on the committee.
Homsley said in Higinson’s case, the main problem is “we have a switch-rail that is just north of town and when they have to have a southbound switch tracks, they stop the northbound trains just before that switch-rail and it has been there forever.”
“Fifty years ago when the trains weren’t a mile long, that was fine, they could pull up to that switch-rail and they weren’t blocking any crossings down here and now like it said, the trains have gotten longer and longer and longer,” he said. “It’s all about profit, that’s the bottom line. It’s all about profit for UP [Union Pacific Railroad] because they can put those trains together and once they get them rolling, they’re not using as much fuel as two trains.”
Homsley said the last time there was a meeting with the railroad, “there was absolutely no compromise on the railroad’s part. Their attitude was ‘we own these crossings and we will more or less do what we want.’”
Homsley said Paul Tessier, who is with public information out of Louisiana for the railroad, has helped him more than anybody else with addressing the problem. “He would get it stopped for a little while; in other words, they would stop their trains before they got into town to block our crossings and that would last for maybe a month and then after that, it was all over again.”
Attempts to reach Tessier for comments on Homsley’s concerns were unsuccessful.
Homsley said the trains cause a safety concern for the town.
“Our town is split in half with the railroad,” Homsley said. “If I need an ambulance on this side of the tracks, our EMS [emergency medical service] has to come from Searcy and if I’m having a heart attack on this side of the tracks and there’s a train blocking the crossings, NorthStar is going to have to go around at least 8 miles to another crossing and then back around to get to this side of the tracks because those crossings are blocked.”
The legislative effort, Homsley said, is “letting Arkansas regulate the lengths of trains because they just keep getting longer and longer. I think UP has told them, ’No, we are federally regulated and you can’t regulate us at all’ and Arkansas is trying to kick back on that and saying, ‘Yeah, we can.’”
“I think there’s something in the Arkansas Constitution that says we can regulate railroads and that’s what they’re trying to do is pass something that we can regulate the length of them,” he said. “Honestly, I had sit there the other day, there was a train that stopped and it stopped before it blocked our crossings, but it took it 23 minutes to clear our crossings, rolling, while it was going because once they take off along the train, they’re not going a half-mile to a mile an hour.
“Even if you’re not block a crossing, a train that long, taking off takes 23 minutes to clear the crossings. Someone can die on the other side of the tracks in that amount of time.”
According to Homsley, solutions to this problem could include moving “this switch-rail to some place on the line where there’s not any towns that they’re disturbing when they do that. There’s sections of their main line that has 3 and 4 miles of open track and they wouldn’t be bothering anybody. But they don’t want to put out the money to move their switch-rails; that’s the problem. It’s going to be up to them to make some kind of solution or shorten their trains, one or the other.
“We will have had the chance to be heard [in the Monday meeting],” he said. “There is one true fact, they are federally regulated and federally backed so it’s hard to do anything. There are so many lobbyists in Washington, you’re not going to get anything done.”
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