Cars trapped for hours while trains sit on the tracks: Action News Jax got a hold of data that shows just how much of a spike neighborhoods in Jacksonville saw last year.
A Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office record lists citations for trains blocking roads from 2013 through the first half of 2017.
Half of the 25 total citations were in the first six months of 2017 -- all CSX trains.
Joy Bradley said she’s waited in her car as long as two hours and 20 minutes while a CSX train was stopped on the tracks outside her Ortega Hills neighborhood.
In June, Action News Jax showed you video of neighbors passing a child and climbing between stopped train cars.
“To me, it’s a lack of respect for those communities. It’s total disregard for their needs,” said Bradley.
In a statement, CSX spokesperson Laura Phelps acknowledged the company had a problem “over the summer,” but said it’s made sweeping changes in the past year to fix it.
Phelps said the company’s new “scheduled railroading model” uses more direct routes with fewer stops.
She also credits CSX’s longer trains with speeding things up, not slowing them down.
Phelps said the average CSX train was about a mile-and-a-quarter long in 2017 – less than five rail cars longer than the 2016 average.
The JSO list of citations is the most recent data the agency’s public records department head said it has, so we don’t know for sure whether the number of citations has gone down since June 2017.
Cox Media Group
