NEWPORT, Maine — After nearly five years of asking, Newport Town Manager James Ricker said Pan Am Railways has agreed to help fix two railroad crossings in town.
“I’m excited that it’s happening,” Ricker said on Wednesday. “I think that Pan Am, at this point, has shown their willingness to work with us. We’re going to stay on this communication level and hopefully what’s happened in the past is in the past and we can simply move forward with this.”
In August, Ricker and several Newport residents expressed their displeasure about the conditions of railroad crossings on the Old Bangor Road and Spring Street.
“I think that crossing is a disgrace,” Vernon Holyoke said of the Old Bangor Road crossing at the time.
The crossing was so bad that the town placed an orange sign there directing motorists to call Pan Am — not the town office — to complain about it. Railroad crossings are privately owned by the rail company.
In response to complaints from the town, Ricker said Pan Am Railways dropped off a section of rail complete with ties intact several years ago, but never installed it. It sat alongside the tracks near the Old Bangor Road crossing until Wednesday.
Ricker reached out to U.S. Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, and the Federal Railroad Administration to help him work with Pan Am to get the crossings fixed.
About three weeks ago, Ricker said representatives from Collins’ office, the FRA and Pan Am sat in his office to talk about the crossings.
“The taxpayers of Newport owe some credit to Sen. Collins’ office for acting in the intermediary role,” Ricker said.
Collins commented on the importance of railways and the need for towns and rail companies to work together.
“When the Town of Newport contacted my office with safety concerns at certain crossings, we facilitated a meeting between the rail line owner, town officials, and the Federal Railroad Administration,” the senator said in a statement. “It’s important that all sides work together not only to keep freight moving, but also to help ensure the public’s safety. I applaud all involved for reaching an agreement to move forward.”
Pan Am Railways Executive Vice President Cynthia Scarano said a spot in Pan Am’s construction schedule opened up to allow it to do work on the crossings.
“We’re doing a lot of crossings in that area. We had this window open for time left in the construction season where we could fit this in,” she said Wednesday. “We were able to sit down and work it out.”
Scarano said weather provides a short season to get work done on rails and crossings.
“We wanted to finish that Brunswick project going up to Freeport. Our workforce was out straight doing that,” she said. “We were able to free up some time to do these town projects.”
Other mid-Maine towns are also scheduled for crossing repairs soon, although she didn’t have the list handy, Scarano said. Work on Pan Am crossings in Maine is scheduled until the second week of November.
Newport crews and Pan Am Railways engineers were reconstructing the railbed on the western side of the Old Bangor Road on Wednesday. The road will remained closed until Thursday afternoon, when the crews will shift focus to the Spring Street crossing.
“We’re going to end up tearing up and paving at the same time,” Ricker said of Thursday’s work on Spring Street, which won’t be as extensive as the work on the Old Bangor Road crossing.
Pan Am and Newport public works will team up again in the spring to finish the crossing on Spring Street and to fix the east crossing on the Old Bangor Road.
The work on both crossings on Wednesday and Thursday will cost the town $10,000, said Ricker, while it will cost Pan Am about $35,000.
“When there’s no signal work involved, it’s about $35,000-$40,000,” said Scarano.
Interesting that this and other states have police stopping and inspecting commercial trucks all the time and levying fines for faulty equipment or putting these trucks out of service until the problems are fixed. Maybe if the RR’s were fined when they cause a risk to public safety for not maintaining their equipment, we could put them out of service until the safety issues are fixed.
Pan Am is definitely bare bones on maintenance crew coverage. One look at the last two years of BDN archives will show at least half a dozen derailments in the Bangor/Eastern Maine area alone. So it appears that the grade crossings don’t get maintained any better than their own track.
Pan Am owes me for at least 5 alignments over the years.
Both can argue the money issue all they want but the 1st time that there’s a rail accident in Newport, and it’s traced to the rail crossing’s, you’re gonna see every insurance adjuster in the State out there, along with MMA’s current carrier, the FRA Inspector’s and the NTSB folk’s. After that it’s just a matter of adding up the inevitable damage claim’s that are on the way. This repair is gonna save both Pan Am and Newport a bunch of money come this winter and next spring so lets all keep that bit of positive perspective in mind when the griper’s start crying about how Newport spent Town money on a Pan Am project. What’s really sad though is that it took Susie Collins’s people to get this moving. Both Pan AM and Newport should have done this on their own. That it took a U.S. Senator to bring pressure, no matter how politely phrased it is, to bear should give everyone a moment’s thought as to why it had to go that far when it should have been a no-brainer from Jump 1.
All Maine towns with RR crossings should get together, and write an ordinance pertaining to RR crossings. The ordinance should address unsafe and dangerous crossings, and provide for penalties per day when they are brought to the attention of Pan Am and not fixed. This situation in Newport is a common theme with Pan Am. It is going on all over the state. It’s time to hold their feet to the fire without having to allocate the resources of our politicians to be forced into fixing these issues.