Things ain't a-workin' on the railroad, all the live-long day

I love trains.

Not that I do a lot of long haul train travel, but I'm always more psyched to get on a train than I am to get on a plane. 

When I was a kid, we went to Chicago every other summer to visit my mother's family. Sometimes we drove; sometimes we took the train. And it's the train trips that I most fondly remember. (Car travel was a lot less romantic. Two memories of those Chicago road trips: Age 3 or 4, setting out at dawn, my sister and I placed toe-to-toe lying down on the back seat of the car, towels tucked in around our necks to catch the inevitable car sickness. Age 13, driving in an unairconditioned car through Midwest heat, and my father deciding we weren't going to stop for lunch on day two. Instead, he bought a large bag of circus peanuts and Pepsi - with a warning "don't tell your mother." She had flown ahead with the two youngest kids. This is actually a fun memory, but even the thought of circus peanuts still makes my stomach roil.)

I loved everything about the train. The glamor of the station. (Worcester's Union Station was quite glamorous in the 1950s.) Staring out the window at the passing farms and towns, imagining living there. The wild roses growing next to the tracks somewhere near Cleveland. The Lombardy poplars we passed in Indiana. The ice cold water dispensed into a flimsy, hard to hold paper cup. The "colored" conductors. Arriving at Chicago's LaSalle Street Station, my grandmother there to pick us up.

As an adult, other than commuter rail I haven't taken all that many train journeys, and the preponderance of those have been between Boston and NYC. I've taken plenty of trains in Europe, but nothing major. The only long US train trip I've taken since those childhood Chicago journeys was Amtrak from Orlando to Boston on the day after 9/11. Carol Burnett was on that train between DC and New York, and when we were coming into Manhattan, we could see the large black cloud that extended most of the length of the island.

Obviously, my experience has been with passenger trains, not freight trains. My only freight train experience was waving to the little red caboose, which I got to do from the James Street

Bridge on the way to the Little League field where my brothers played ball, or from the Hadwen Bridge on the way to Hadwen Park. That and reading one of my favorite Little Golden Books, The Little Red Caboose.

But I know that, over the years, freight trains have gotten longer and heavier. And there are a ton of derailments. 

The rate of train derailments has increased over the past decade, with two derailments per every 1m miles traveled on the railroads, compared to 1.71 derailments in 2013. There were 818 derailments reported in 2022, with 447 train cars carrying hazardous materials either damaged or derailed. (Source: The Guardian)

And so we get the East Palestine, Ohio debacle. And, in close order, another freight train derailment in Ohio which, fortunately, didn't involve hazardous materials. Oh, yeah, and yet another Norfolk-Southern derailment in Alabama. 

Oh, Norfolk-Southern has promised to make things all better for the residents of East Palestine, but the money they're talking about is a pittance. A few million for cleanup, a few million to reimburse for temporary displacement, a few hundred thousand to a scholarship fund.

The CEO appeared before Congress last week for a grilling, and pronounced that they'd do whatever needed to get done to make things whole for the folks of East Palestine. But, of course, he mealy-mouthed on what exactly they were committing to. 

I can't imagine what those poor people are going through.

Despite the assurance of EPA officials, politicians, and Norfolk-Southern that things are okie-dokie, how must the people of East Palestine be feeling right now? 

I'll bet all 5,000 of them are wondering whether they're going to develop some awful cancer. Or that their kids are going to die. Or that their unborn babies are going to be born with terrible health issues. And the frosting on the cake, of course, is that ain't no one going to buy a house in East Palestine, Ohio, anytime soon. Which means that those who own homes in this modest blue collar town are going to be underwater if they try to sell and get out of town. Rock, meet hard place.

To me, this has Love Canal written all over it. Or Centralia, Pennsylvania, the ghost town which saw its population plummet from 1,000 in 1980 to 5 by last count, thanks to its residents fleeing the town which became unlivable due to an underground coal mine fire that's been smoldering underneath it since the early 1960s.

I'm guessing that, at this point, most of the citizens of East Palestine would abandon township if they could.

Not that this would be their ideal.

Even if Norfolk-Southern were making them whole, they'd still be leaving their home, their neighbors, their community, their shops, their churches, their bowling alleys, their schools. 

As we've seen time and again, when entire communities are upended - think highways and/or urban development cutting wide swaths through existing neighborhoods during the 1950's and 1960's - it doesn't end well. Intact communities (largely of the poorer, working class variety) were broken up as those with power ran roughshod over them. 

So, even if the East Palestinians are made financially whole...

And even if they stay put, with all the assurances in the world given to them, how comfortably are they going to sleep at night, worrying about what could happen 10, 20 years down the road?

Not to mention that, given the state of the railroad biz, there are apt to me more East Palestine incidents in the future.

Train-brake rules were rolled back under the Trump administration and have not been restored; hazardous material regulations were watered down at the behest of the railroad industry; and railroad workers have been decrying the safety impacts incited by years of staffing cuts, poor working conditions and neglect by railroad corporations in favor of Wall Street investors...

“The railroads have opposed any government regulation on train length; they have sought waivers to eliminate having trained inspectors monitor railcars; and they have pushed back on the train crew staffing rule.” said Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen (Blet) national president Eddie Hall in a statement after the NTSB preliminary report on the East Palestine derailment.

“The railroads and their trade association the Association of American Railroads (AAR) employ armies of lobbyists on Capitol Hill who are there not to promote safety regulations but to slow the implementation of federal safety regulations – or attempt to eliminate them altogether.”

I see.

For years, the railroads have fought off regulation. They've ignored safety measures. In the name of efficiency, they've cut staffing. And things are falling through the tracks.

Not that lack of safety is anything new.

My husband's father worked as a brakeman on the Boston and Maine, in the Bellows Falls, VT, railyard. When Jim was 11, his father was crushed to death between a coal car and an out building that should've been moved. But regulation, smegulation.

Some element of danger has always been, and will likely always be, associated with trains, as it is with any other form of transportation. (Trains and boats and planes. And cars.)

I love trains. 

But, man, if I were in East Palestine, Ohio, I'd be saying 'see you in court, Norfolk-Southern.' 

Even if there still were red cabooses, there'll be no one waving to that railroad, except to give them the middle finger.