OKLAHOMA CITY — On any given day, drivers somewhere in Oklahoma have to stop for several minutes and wait for a train to pass through an at-grade railroad crossing.
Oklahoma has 23 railway companies and is crisscrossed by approximately 2,900 miles of railroad tracks that intersect with county roads, municipal streets, and state/federal highways at 3,475 public grade crossings, records of the Oklahoma Department of Transportation and the Oklahoma Corporation Commission reflect.
“Emergency service vehicles in Davis, Oklahoma, can take almost 37 minutes to reach sites two and a half blocks away because of a blocked crossing forcing them onto alternative routes,” the state argued in a legal brief.
A spokesperson for the City of Edmond said municipal officials examined footage from a camera mounted on a building and discovered that during a 41-day period in 2018, between June 25 and August 5, trains blocked a Main Street intersection for a total of 53 hours and 15 minutes.
“We have 11 crossings in our city limits, and a stopped train will typically block five to seven of those crossings and do so immediately,” the spokesperson said.
Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway is still blocking crossings in Edmond.
During the week of Sept. 25 – Oct. 1, for example, BNSF trains blocked railroad crossings on just one day but on three separate occasions for a total of 2 hours and 26 minutes of stoppages, said Bill Begley, the city’s marketing and public relations manager. And during the week of Oct. 24-30, BNSF trains blocked crossings in Edmond for 2 hours and 50 minutes.
And Edmond has a host of railroad crossings. Just in the downtown area there are railroad crossings at Hurd Street, Main Street, First Street, Danforth Road and Thatcher Street.
A typical train passing through town “takes three to four minutes to completely pass through a public grade crossing,” Begley said.
“We’re working with BNSF on this,” he said. “But rather than an adversarial posture, we’re trying to mutually resolve these issues.”
Living with train traffic “is part and parcel of living here,” Begley said. “It’s part of why we became a town.” Edmond was a water stop on the Atchison Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad “at Mile Marker 103,” he said.
Edmond residents typically complain on social media, “but rarely in person,” about the disruptions in traffic flow, Begley said.
The Oklahoma Corporation Commission has fielded 841 complaints of trains blocking at-grade railroad crossings for extended periods of time over the past four years, according to Brent Payne, railroad manager in the commission’s Transportation Division.
However, the complaints have plummeted by nearly two-thirds: from 361 in 2019 to 133 this year, Payne said.
During the coronavirus pandemic the number of blocked-crossing complaints “dropped like a stone,” he said. “It may have been that during the lockdown, with people not going out to eat, etc., they weren’t driving and thus not encountering blocked crossings.”
And when federal trial and appellate courts overruled Oklahoma’s blocked-crossing law, “Informed members of the public stopped reporting blockages” to the Corporation Commission, Payne said.