Mackenzie Click-Mickelson
Chugging along the path of life
- Joined
- Oct 23, 2015
Ok yeah I can totally see that. And observationally the trains are absolutely getting longer. It used to be said that about 88 trains per day (and that was just the BNSF ones) went through just the west side of my city but it's possible that has been slightly reduced but just with longer trains going through.Fewer employees are doing more jobs for longer hours, maintenance windows are being extended, trains are being loaded longer and heavier, and the locomotive industry has far too much power to make their own safety regulations or lobby regulations out of bills in Congress.
All of that is ignoring the question about whether or not we should be even transporting some of these materials at all.
BNSF is the main railroad company in my area with a few others smaller lines but we know how hard of a struggle it is to get them to repair the railroad crossings. They def. upkeep the tracks (it's not uncommon to see new ties by the crossing) but the grading, corrections, etc for the crossings have been such a struggle. Everyone wants to blame the city but the city is like we cannot do anything about it we're at the mercy of the railroad companies. One crossing that is a high traffic one for a while needed to be repaired every couple of months but BNSF was delaying it. It was so bad it was destroying undercarriages of vehicles because the asphalt had been weighed down so much you were just hitting the tracks and so hard too. And on the west side of the city (where I live) there is only 1 bridge the rest you have to wait for crossings so it's hard to avoid them.
The transport is a good question I just don't know how else we get these from place to place.