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| NOISY NEIGHBOR AS TRAIN TRAFFIC
INCREASES, FRESNANS AGAIN ARE RAILING AGAINST THE DIN.
Jim Wasserman THE FRESNO BEE Don Brown greets a reporter bounding up his northwest Fresno driveway as if he's expected this moment for years. Come on, a whole Fresno family enduring 40 trains a day outside its living room window? It's about time! "You want to know about these noisy trains?" he guesses.
"And how we can stand living here?" Bingo. It's like asking a cop who works nights about a bad apartment complex. Brown comes uncorked, talking about living in this house too long, five years now living with trains -- 280 trains a week and 1,120 trains every month. That's 13,440 trains a year going past! "The lady next door said, 'You'll get used to them,'" he vents. "You think you'll get used to it, but it just rattles you." He points to the concrete-block wall just across Jeanne Avenue. On the other side is Brown's little fragment of 33,500 miles of Burlington Northern Santa Fe track west of Chicago. This poor, rattled neighbor to Fresno's most popularly cussed, slurred and vilified railroad line, says with the resignation familiar along these tracks: "We're afraid if they have a derailment that wall won't stop anything." Now Brown drives off to a Giants game in San Francisco. Then just like a movie, on cue, comes a BNSF freight train hauling a double stack of truck trailers. You can see it over the wall there, 100 feet away. The train goes by awhile, then rolls to a stop across the street and sits there. It's part of the neighborhood. But these scenes will end soon -- in every Fresno neighborhood along these 104-year-old tracks -- if a new band of rail warriors has its say. Suddenly, in a city where growth puts ever more houses along a railroad that was there first, and where development steers more drivers toward blocked crossing gates, an old recurring theme in Fresno's history -- rail consolidation -- is rearing up again. And as a growing number of Fresnans intersect with a still-rising number of trains because of a strong national economy, a decades-old cry of "enough" is reviving itself. Fres-nans are gathering petitions and writing letters to the editor. Even political candidates and the city's 2020 General Plan proposal are calling for consolidation. Like all their predecessors since the idea first surfaced in 1918, these Fresnans want to move BNSF trains to the Union Pacific corridor along Freeway 99. That line now carries 22 trains a day. "The only issue is, 'We don't have the money,' and I don't buy that," says John Ferdinandi, a northwest Fresno grandfather who recently formed Fresno Area Residents for Relocating the Inner-City BNSF Rail Corridor. "The argument about lack of funds isn't satisfactory anymore because there's too many surpluses." Ferdinandi caught consolidation fever last fall when a BNSF train derailed near his grandchildren's house. Now he writes blistering letters, trades arguments and statistics with politicians and has earned himself a seat on the Council of Fresno County Governments rail committee. His fellow instigator, Carol Dillon, also ridicules the lack-of-money excuse. "With all this excess money that [Gov.] Davis and [President] Clinton talk about, damn it," she says defiantly. "Get rid of this." Surviving derailment Dillon, who last year endured the same smelly derailment of wine and wine coolers 200 feet from her house in northwest Fresno, recalls: "The house shook and the pool water splashed, and then there was dead silence. You knew something was wrong." She says, "I was told by several people when I bought this house in 1984 that the trains would be moved. Now every time I see one go by, I say, 'Please God, let it keep going.'" At last count, consultants pegged the cost to move BNSF trains to the UP line at about $206 million. Undoubtedly, the price now is higher. But Ferdinandi has picked up political and corporate allies to take another look. Last Thursday night, the Council of Governments voted to kick in $25,000 to update a 1993 study that said consolidation is doable. (Since that study, both railroads have undergone mergers, while high-speed rail also has entered the mix). Fresno County recently agreed to contribute $25,000, while BNSF and Union Pacific each will pay $12,500. Tuesday at 2:15 p.m. Ferdinandi will appeal to the Fresno City Council to budget its own $25,000. But a council that two years ago gave the BNSF Railroad an open-ended perpetual right to use the corridor, rather than negotiate a new 50-year lease in 2008, has been reluctant. Council President Tom Boyajian, recalling last summer's budget sessions, says, "I didn't see a lot of enthusiasm for the council to do it. "It's another study," he says. At the Council of Governments office in downtown Fresno, rail planner Clark Thompson says he'd like an updated study to "show us where in the country that consolidation has occurred. What sort of organizational arrangement was in place to make it happen? This is on the scale of a huge public works project, and nobody seems to know how to do it." At BNSF offices in Kansas City, spokesman Steve Forsberg says, "What you're asking the railroad to do is the equivalent of asking a state highway department to pick up and move a freeway." By any measure, the BNSF railroad line is Fresno's version of a black hole that sucks in vehicle traffic. Anywhere you drive in Fresno, east or west, eventually you're pulled into it -- where crossing lights flash and gates come down, where you sit two to four minutes watching freight cars. Among BNSF's 5,000 locomotives and 90,000 freight cars nationally, the ones through Fresno pass tough old industrial and residential neighborhoods near downtown and then disrupt classes at Fresno City College. They whistle through 1940s and 1950s neighborhoods that lack sound walls, and then newer apartments near Fig Garden, where kids throw dirt clods at parked trains. All these places are testament to long-standing city and county policies allowing homes as close to the tracks as builders can sell them. At London Properties, sales manager Hank Janzen estimates that a house near the tracks is worth 5% to 10% less than a similar house elsewhere. He says: "It definitely impacts the marketability. Some people will not buy the property at all." Tracks? What tracks? Indeed, at one point the trains pass another firm's "For Sale" sign where a phone call leads to a recorded voice calling the house "light and airy" -- without mentioning the tracks next door. The BNSF and Amtrak also pass Shaw and Marks avenues, site of a controversial $16 million underpass project. This is ground zero for the political question: what makes more sense? Moving the trains or digging underpasses such as these? Finally, the trains pass more new houses rising near the tracks, at Trend's Mardi Gras and Centex's Mahogany at The Bluffs. By now, because of tougher city requirements, there are sound walls and even landscaped pedestrian trails next to them. Behind these walls, trains speed north across San Joaquin River bridge and into Madera County. In the wake of these trains are thousands of residents with varying levels of acceptance -- living with horns in the night and rumbling steel during the day. Many say it wasn't so bad years ago when there were seven or eight trains a day. But now, Amtrak has 10 trains a day and aims to add two more. The BNSF runs 30 trains a day and plans more. In San Francisco, Lena Kent, a BNSF spokeswoman, confirms the likelihood of more trains. She says, "We expect growth. It's difficult to quantify what that growth will be. But the economy is going well, and as a result many things are being transported by rail." Ferdinandi told COG members Thursday night that the number could rise to 65 a day. With more being moved -- everything from mail, lumber and beer to raw food and toxic agricultural chemicals -- Ferdinandi calls the city's situation a disaster waiting to happen. He pulls out pictures of last year's wine spill, revealing a rail car split wide open near a Fresno neighborhood. "If that was caustic, what would happen?" he wants to know. Statistics from the PUC show that Fresno County reported 11 train-related casualties in 1999 -- 17% of those in the state with only 2% of its population. Only Los Angeles County, with 12 casualties, had more. Indeed, in 1998, the PUC said Fresno had the most dangerous crossings in the state. And trains have derailed seven times in the city during the past 11 months, Ferdinandi says. Still, in the railroad's favor, there have been no Fresno incidents for years that could be called truly horrific, nor any disastrous spills that called for ambulances and flooded city hospitals. But "what if's" remain on the minds of Fresnans such as George Giannopoulos. Some see scary sight Giannopoulos, who lives within horn-hearing distance of the tracks, believes there are more toxics coming through town today. "Those things on boxcars are actually for trucks," he says. "Now they have double-deckers coming through town. I look at them, and I'm scared. I'm scared something's going to happen." Without doubt, most Fresnans favor consolidation -- and even railroad executives say they're open to it. But the hurdle is money. Powerful Los Angeles recently got major state and federal funding for its $2 billion Alameda Corridor project, which eliminates 200 street crossings. Whole sections of a 20-mile line connecting east Los Angeles with Long Beach ports are going below ground. Likewise, Reno, Nev., plans a $213 million project to take 19 daily freight trains off 13 crossings near its downtown hotels and casinos. The city will borrow $90 million to supplement railroad and government funding for a 2.1-mile below-ground trench. But political infighting abounds over the project, and some believe it will cost millions more. Meanwhile, in Fresno, growth continues along the BNSF corridor. Two months ago, Virginia Gallegos moved her family from San Jose to a new Trend Mardi Gras home a stone's throw from the railroad line. Gallegos, still swooning from halving her housing costs and getting a new home at a bargain, says the trains aren't so bad. The big freights make vibrations, she says, but her back wall and Jeanne Avenue buffer her house from the tracks. All around her, more houses are going up. But a few miles south of her new house, Ferdinandi presses on with his talk of Measure C's transportation tax, a possible public-opinion ballot measure on consolidation, and always, more letters to officials. He rattles off a list of supporters, including the League of Women Voters, the Lowell-Jefferson Consortium and 1000 Friends of Fresno. Tuesday, he's bringing more than 2,000 signatures to the Fresno City Council. This activism is an old story in Fresno. Almost from the day -- Oct. 5, 1896 -- that Engine 50 of the new San Francisco and San Joaquin Valley Railroad pulled into a Fresno of 11,000 people -- people have griped about its rail crossings. But Ferdinandi says this time it's for keeps. "We're not going to go away," he says. "There's too many of us now." INFOBOX DANGEROUS RAILS 1999-2000 rail accidents/incidents on Fresno's BNSF line 1999 BNSF: Jan. 10. Harvey Avenue. 12:30 p.m. One injured. BNSF: Jan. 13. Orange Avenue. 9:20 p.m. BNSF: March 12. Palm Avenue. 8:35 p.m. One killed. Amtrak: June 3. Alley. 2:04 p.m. One injured. BNSF: June 12. Mariposa Street. 12:35 a.m. BNSF: June 24. Weldon Avenue. 5:10 p.m. One injured. Amtrak: Aug. 30. California Avenue. 3:07 p.m. One injured. Amtrak: Sept. 3. Hammond Avenue. 6:55 a.m. BNSF: Oct. 8. Adams Avenue. 9:55 a.m. Amtrak: Oct. 23. White Avenue. 1:59 p.m. BNSF: Nov. 17. California Avenue. 8:25 a.m. One injured. Amtrak: Dec. 11. Harvey Avenue. 10:11 p.m. One injured. 2000 BNSF: Feb. 9. Hamilton Avenue. 8:20 a.m. Amtrak: Feb. 14: Shaw Avenue. 12:08 p.m. Amtrak: Feb. 24. Harvey Avenue. 11:14 a.m. Three injured. Source: California Public Utilities Commission
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