SAN JOSE, Calif. — The city of San Jose is miffed at Union Pacific, complaining about train noise and other issues along the right-of-way,and is ready to go to court over its grievances.
Particularly at issue is nighttime operation of trains through downtown, which has increased in recent months as the railroad altered its operating plan, leading to complaints from nearby residents. Those complaints brought more than 100 residents to a Wednesday meeting, KTVU-TV reports, some holding signs demanding the railroad not run trains at night. They also have the city’s mayor and council threatening to sue the railroad.
At the meeting, the railroad said night operations, and the accompanying sounding of horns for grade crossings, will continue. “We are obligated to run trains at night — due to capacity during the day,” Union Pacific representative Francisco Castillo said, according to KGO-TV.
“We’re not going to purposefully run an inefficient railroad,” spokesman Clint Schelbitzki said, according to the San Jose Mercury News.
The city is studying the possibility of installing the grade-crossing equipment necessary to make the area a horn-free quiet zone, but the study will not be done until the end of the year. Mayor Sam Liccardo thinks the railroad should pick up the tab, according to KTVU: “It’s clear to me that local taxpayers should not be subsidizing the business decisions of Union Pacific. If there’s infrastructure here, Union Pacific ought to be paying for it.”
The issues of graffiti, trash, and homeless encampments led the city council’s rules committee to send to the full council a memo directing the city attorney to explore a lawsuit against the railroad, as well as possible rezoning of the railroad’s land. The mayor’s budget has allocated $500,000 to explore legal remedies.
The railroad, in a statement, said it looked forward to working with the city on broader plans addressing homelessness and is working on a memorandum of understanding with the city “that we believe will help mitigate transient encampment and illegal dumping concerns.” The railroad said it is identifying spots to add fencing and exploring other options.
my guess is the railroad was there first. but it’s California where stupidity is king
They’ve got $500,000 of tax-payer money to sue UP?! Why not apply that instead to upgrading the crossings to horn-free zones. And UP is responsible for trash, graffiti, and homelessness? Seems like UP should be the litigant against San Jose for allowing citizen-trespassers on UP’s right of way.
HEY San Jose citizens….if you don’t like it…MOVE! The RR was there LONG before you idiots showed up. Yeah, go ahead and sue UP. YOU WILL LOOSE! The homeless issue is ALL ON YOU! SJ is allowing the bums to camp out in their city. Not the railroad. Just look what the bleeding heart liberals are allowing in SF. Show San Jose, SHUT UP!
People move into the area where the railroad has been for a century and half then want the railroad to go away. The city should take it up with the courts over rulings making it almost impossible to remove homeless camps. Instead of spending laws harassing Uncle Pete they should spend the money addressing homeless problem. The city has the “California Peculiar” problem of wanting to regulating interstate commerce. The city can also find itself in the position of paying the UP’s legal costs. The state, county, city attorneys have gone litigation crazy
Good luck with that, you morons!
The city I live in has crossings which require no horn, seems to be no problem.
So let’s get this straight: the people of San Jose (well, at least some of them), trash UPRR’s private property, and then the city expects UP to clean it up . Last I checked the UPRR was a railroad with private property rights, not a garbage collection service.
We’re long past the point when California was the Land of Fruits and Nuts. Now California is the land of truly evil people. I’d be very happy if California left the United States or if we were to expel them.
The two locals in question are the Salinas Hauler to Watsonville and Salinas and the Mission Bay hauler up the Peninsula to South San Francisco. Both out of Warm Springs and running on a non-passenger UP line up to the wye connection just north of San Jose Diridon Station where they continue on trackage used by Caltrain and Amtrak.
These trains used to slot in between Caltrain runs outside of the morning or evening rush. While I agree that living by active tracks and complaining about train noise is nonsense, I don’t think UP is being honest about the real reason for the somehow PSR related schedule changes.
Interestingly most of the traffic in question (not all) is rock, and to the extent that some of this rock moves from quarries by truck that’s also a complaint in the South Bay.
Today is June 6th. Interesting to compare and contrast the whiners and crybabies of today with the men who clawed their way onto the Normandy beaches 75 years ago today.
I could say something more, but I think I’ve said enough. I might offend someone, and they’re not worth my time.
It’s the horns, nothing else. Fix that and the problem goes away. No other country in the world (except maybe Canada) has trains as noisy as ours. There’s no reason for horns anyway, other than emergencies and special circumstances, and people in cars don’t pay attention to them (or anything else) anyway.
IGNORE…………………..SAD TO BE AN AMERICAN
…….NO COMMENT because U NO IT IS A TRUE ……………….
Gerald Mc Farlane. Your post about Viet Nam Vets is totally unfair. While some of our servicemen do have problems studies have shown that they have no more problems than the population in general. It is this false stigma that causes people who don’t know better to shy away from hiring vets.
Wait til the City of San Jose does their investigation of those Crossings and their protection to allow ‘Horn-Free’ operations. Some time back there was a small community in this area, that was pushing for automated crossings[w/o horns]. Their opposition went away when they found that said equipment,per crossing was going to cost THEM; approx $250K per crossing. THEY would initially, have to purchase the required crossing equipment, pay for the BNSF to install it, and then it would go to BNSF ownership; who [BNSF] would then be responsible for its maintenance….
These are the same liberal thinking rich people who didn’t think Trump could beat Hillary and when he did they couldn’t ACCEPT THEY WERE WRONG! Now they want someone else to fix this problem they were part of causing, thinking they are smarter than the average Federal Judge who will tell them their case has no merit because the problems could be remedied if the City would quit demanding defacto justice and install the gates needed to create Quite zones which would make everyone happy 24/7.
If a state as small as Utah can create quiet zones in cities a fraction of the size of San Joser, then what does that say about those running the Government in that City? Inept and Shallow thinking come to mind. Its time the people of San Jose do something about their do nothing leaders and quit getting “Josed!”
Without going into a lot of details, the law in this area is well settled and very clear. State and local attempts to control or restrict rail operations are preempted by Federal law. There are plenty of cases on this point. With respect to the blowing of horns, this is also governed by Federal law, in particular the FRA regulations at 49 CFR Part 222. The cited regulation also specifies what needs to be done to establish a “quiet zone” where horns need not be routinely sounded.
Mister Benham:
Not sure they can. They can’t suspend service nor abandon trackage without permission from the STB. On the other hand, they can make existing service so odious to use that shippers on that corridor would switch to other means, and then use the resulting lack of traffic as justification for application for abandonment.
The above comments are generic in nature and do not form the basis for an attorney/client relationship. They do not constitute legal advice. I am not your attorney. Find your own damn mouthpiece.
I wonder if they would be bothered if UP sold their trackage to CalTrans and abandon freight services in that area.
The Merc-Snooze article I read was focused on Japantown near downtown SJ. This info was all posted days ago on another railfan+rail professional internet comment forum with the initials Tee Oh. It included a link to the newspaper article I got my info from.
I don’t doubt even more NIMBYs came crawling out of the woodwork along Monterey Highway though. But if you live here (as I have for the past two and a half years) you’d know that there are new condo developments that have been built right next to the freight only tracks going through Japantown with many closely spaced grade crossings and only a couple of (short) movements a day, now happening late at night.
Not that I’m all that sympathetic since that’s what living next to an active railroad entails. I’ll bet it’s loud though at 2AM or whatever and it didn’t used to be. And why REALLY must these locals run at 0-dark-hundred again? I’d prefer the old schedule if I was a train crew assigned to it too. Come to think of it this was one of a couple reasons in my two stints working for a Class 1 that it didn’t take long at all to dismiss the idea of working in T&E service when the partially attractive idea of it came up.
The NIMBY residents near the railroad are being paid to listen to the horns account of lower taxes on the less valuable real estate. It they don’t like living near the railroad, move elsewhere and pay higher taxes.
People get used to train horns at crossing and sleep through it. Why are people still buying land near train crossing, and building new homes next to the tracks? The real villains are the apartment builders that buy the real cheap land near an industry or railroad yard, build apartments that they rent in the daytime but at night the new renter/buyer discover the railroad does it work at night. The builder sells and runs. The apartments become slum account of bad location. The town is guilty for bad zoning and get the kick back from the builder and more taxes from the apartments..
Well it is California.
Maybe a study should be done to see if the result of smoking the tobacco alternative makes train horns seem excessively loud.
First, not all or even half of the homeless here are homeless because of mental issues, other than Vietnam Vets who have numerous problems, homelessness being one of them, the others choose to live that way because it’s lucrative to do so(collecting cans, dumpster diving for recyclables and the handouts).
Secondly, if Trains had bothered to actually go to the Mercury News article this is about the mainline South of Diridon that parallels the Monterey Highway(aka El Camino Real), so the UP’s contention that they are obligated to run at night is not because of CalTrain(which does not have that much service between Diridon and Gilroy(the segment in question is South of Diridonon the mainline to Diridon, not the lines from Warm Springs into San Jose. Third, some people are talking of selling and moving, good, make the prices attractive enough and I know lots of people that would be willing to buy a house alongside a somewhat active rail line, if they wanted to live in California and could afford it of course. The littering and trespassing is from the homeless themselves, so if you enforce the laws as Al Dicenso says, then the homeless would be in jail vs mental hospitals.
As for grade separation of the right of way, there’s not enough room to do this cost effectively without completely reconstructing the Monterey Highway/El Camino(State Route 82), the cross streets(those that actually cross the right of way) and the UP mainline. It would also have to be a 50/50 split because not just the local residences benefit, but so does the UP from no longer have to worry about vehicles blocking the track, and a byproduct of this would be a straight shot for CalTrain into the southern end of the County, allowing increased service and an easier route to electrification(which would eventually have happened anyways once CAHSR reached the Peninsula…and you can hear the bitching about that 20 years before it happens).
Now, since the UP answers to Wall Street and not customers or those cities it passes through then nothing will be done. However, if the company was really forward thinking and respected the communities is passed through it wouldn’t be a stretch of the imagination for them to offer the following proposal. We’ll clean up the area, kick out the homeless and pay for sound walls(which would be just as effective), but going forward the city is responsible for keeping the homeless out and people dumping garbage along the right of way…win/win for everyone involved, but corporations don’t think that way, only of the bottom line.
Put the homeless in mental hospitals where they belong, enforce the laws against littering and trespass, and the problem is fixed. Chances of its happening zilch to none. Too many bed-wetting media do-gooders out there feeling sorry for them.
(Opps) to continue. If UP starts arresting the homeless and forcing them to move, then tbe ACLU will sue for violating the rights of homeless to trespass. Or something like that. No win.
So trash, graffiti, homeless trespassers are all UP’s fault. So if UP goes in acstarts