As train merger approaches, locals look down the line

Note: Hear that train a-comin’ is a five-part series about an expected merger between Canadian Pacific and Kansas City Southern, and the impacts it would have on the communities of Washington County. This article is the fifth installment.

With a proposed CP-KCS merger on the horizon, communities big and small focus on the steps remaining in the process and what they can do to mitigate impacts if it goes through.

For those worried about disruptive noise and safety hazards from an additional 14 trains per day along the Ottumwa line, quiet zones are the gold standard of infrastructure investments. The zones involve installing added safety measures around crossings, and in turn removing requirements for trains to blow their horns as they approach.

“In order to silence the horns and create a railroad quiet zone, which is a Federal Railroad Administration designation, you have to meet certain requirements,” said Michael Halley, a former Fairfield City Council member who led the charge to install quiet zones in his community around a decade ago. “The way that you create the quiet zone is by making the crossings safer than they were before, which is kind of the opposite of the way a lot of people initially perceived it.”

Those requirements, however, are not easy to meet. Halley said they needed a way to stop cars from circumventing the crossing gate — like by installing a median or extra crossing gates, the latter of which is more expensive — as well as extra signage and other safety infrastructure. While these are not the only investments that can qualify a crossing for a quite zone, they are by far the most popular according to FRA guides.

“That’s the number one cause of a vehicle-train collision, people think they can gauge the distance the train is by the sound, which you can’t,” Halley said. “The simplest remedy is to put in a two-foot wide median from a concrete strip from where that gate lowers to, they prefer, 100 feet away from the crossing.”

All that infrastructure comes with a hefty price tag.

“A typical crossing on a two-lane roadway with a two quadrant gate and nothing really special about it could be $250,000-$350,000, each location,” said Tammy Nicholson, director of the Iowa Department of Transportation’s Modal Transportation Bureau. “Part of it is the equipment that is getting installed, some of it is the actual construction of putting it in, and then to interconnect the wiring of it all.”

Cities and counties can seek outside funding to install quiet zones, but Nicholson said grants were highly competitive.

“The Section 130 safety program (is) a federal funding program that the Iowa DOT does administer, and we get about $5.7 million per year that we put into those grade crossings improvements,” she said. “If a crossing has showed that it’s going to have … a positive safety effect, then it has to compete for that funding because there’s a limited amount. We usually rank those based on highest need, and are able to fund like 90% of a project through those federal funds.”

Winning those grants could be tricky. The DOT’s current list of pending applications for Section 130 grants is 47 items long as of its last update on Jan. 12. The list of projects receiving aid in fiscal year 2023, which was released in Sept. 2021, is just 16 items long.

"There’s always more crossings out there that people would like to get safety improvements on than what we have funding to do,“ Nicholson said. ”And then the timeline for that, it takes a couple of years before a project gets built through that program.“

Fairfield sees an average of 22 trains every 24 hours according to estimates from Burlington Northern Santa Fe, the railway company that owns the line running through the city to Mt. Pleasant.

With that kind of traffic volume, Halley said the quiet zones were worth it.

“What we did at the crossings … decreased the risk of an accident by 50%, we made the crossings twice as safe,” he said. “I did the math and it was like an hour of every day was train horns, interspersed throughout the day and the night. So to not have that noise pollution, for the residences and the businesses along the tracks especially … it was probably the single best project I worked on in my 12 years on city council.”

Many community members said quiet zones would solve most of their concerns with the increased train traffic a CP-KCS merger would entail.

“If we could say, ‘You are in a quiet zone from this section to this section,’ that would definitely have an impact,” Real Estate Broker Patty Elliott said. “It’s already a question that buyers have right now, only having the minimal amount of trains that we have going through. When we were selling the town homes across the street from Fareway, that was a question there.”

Ainsworth resident George Trotter said the quiet zones would drastically improve quality of life for nearby residents.

“We have three roads into town that cross the tracks right there into city limits, so we’ve got trains blowing their horn all the time,” he said. “If we could just get them to suspend the whistle or the horns, that would alleviate a lot of the discomfort … they can be painfully loud when they come by and you’re out in the yard.”

Solutions for traffic disruptions also exist, but are significantly harder to address. The only way to completely solve blocked crossings would be to install new grade separations (underpasses or overpasses,) but price tags run high. One Iowa DOT cost estimate document said that a new underpass would go for nearly $800,000 in the state.

“We have not funded, through Section 130, a full underpass or overpass before,” Nicholson said. “Reason being, we would probably only do one project per year.”

Nicholson said federal funding for those projects was at an “unprecedented” level, but remained challenging to acquire.

“There’s a new program that is in the bipartisan infrastructure bill that was just signed in November, a railroad crossing elimination grant program,” she said. “That is funded nationwide at $600 million for year … applicants would need to apply for a piece of that funding and then compete nationwide for it. We don’t really have an idea of what that competition’s going to look like, but I would think it would be pretty significant.”

To prevent business disruptions for companies already using their service, the railway could install siding where trains could temporarily stop. Unlike other infrastructure, new siding would be installed at the railroad’s expense, rather than by local government.

“That would be the answer, but are they willing to do that is the question,” Iowa Renewable Energy CFO/COO Ron Lutovsky said.

CP has floated the idea of installing new siding east of Washington but has not yet finalized plans to do so according to several public officials familiar with the issue.

While the option wouldn’t strain local government budgets, Ainsworth Fire Chief Waylon Schultz said he worried it would raise the risk of traffic disruptions.

“If that would happen, my biggest fear is that trains would be slowing down going through town or maybe even stopping to wait for the tracks to switch over to go onto that bypass track,” he said. “That would slow our response time even more, if those trains are stopped or going a lot slower than they are now.”

For some community members, there is no easy solution. Washington resident Laurie Wittmayer-O'Neill said she strongly opposed any new disruptions from the train.

“I think it serves other people at our expense,” she said. “If they could go over the city, around the city or even, like in Norway, I think they go under … they need to think about how they can route it so it isn’t in the heart of the community. If they’re going to have that much heavy traffic, they need to build a new route out in the country and go around the cities.”

An important caveat remains: the federal Surface Transportation Board (STB) has yet to approve the merger, a regulatory requirement for it to take effect. Until it does so, community members can voice their concerns with comments directly to the STB.

“Members of the public are never excluded from proceedings,” STB Public Affairs Officer Michael Booth said. “They can make comments individually, as a group, or however they’d like; on the record for the Board to consider. All you have to do is file a written comment.”

To make those comments, anyone with internet access can go to STB.gov and navigate to the “E-Filings” tab under the “Proceedings and Actions” header. Once there, users can scroll down to a link labeled “Environmental Comments” on the right-hand side of the page, and fill out a form with their comment. The docket number for the CP-KCS merger is FD_36500.

Booth said environmental comments were not limited to environmental conservation concerns, and could cover most aspects of the merger’s community impact.

The exact steps remaining in the merger’s possible approval are foggy, but Booth said it would likely take at least a few more months.

“We’re reacting to filings just like a court case,” he said. “Somebody could make a motion to dismiss something, that could be the next step in the procedure. Somebody could drop their case entirely, or add additional evidence … It’s not all set in stone.”

Comments: Kalen.McCain@southeastiowaunion.com