BENSON - There is no easy solution to the problems created by Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway Company trains blocking the main crossings in downtown Benson, but there is one that greatly improves safety.
“I think we have a product that we can move forward on,’’ said Benson City Manager Rob Wolfington as he outlined the proposal to the Swift County board of commissioners Tuesday. Stantec Engineering of Fargo, North Dakota offered the proposal as part of a study it completed for the city and Swift County.
Benson city council members discussed the study at their meeting Tuesday with its author, Peggy Harter.
The proposal outlined for Benson would provide a higher level of safety by reducing the chances for collisions involving trains, motor vehicles and pedestrians at the six crossings in town. Iit would help resolve another very worrisome safety issue in the community:
When trains block crossings - especially the three downtown locations - they impede emergency service responders. The city’s police and fire departments, and the Swift County Benson Hospital are on the south side of the tracks. The ambulance service, sheriff’s office and Benson Public Schools are on the north side.
The Stantec study recommends upgrading dirt and gravel roadways to the east and west of the downtown to assure a passable road is always available. Each road is located beyond the length of a stalled train that could be blocking the main crossings. At the same time, communication equipment would be added to the BNSF’s signals so that emergency responders could use mobile devices to know which crossings are blocked and which are open.
It will cost in the range of $2.7 million to $3 million to address the issues posed by the railroad crossings if the full complement of strategies identified in the study are implemented.
The study recommends installing four gates in place of two at the busy 14th Street crossing downtown, near the intersection where motor vehicle traffic on U.S. Highway 12 and Minnesota Highways 9 and 29 meet. Four gates would prevent motorists from driving around gates.
The existing, two gate configurations could remain at the 12th and 13th Street crossings downtown, but those streets should be made one-way routes. That’s not likely to be a popular change, but the city manager noted that the other option is even less so: Closing the streets at the crossings.
The study also calls for installing crossing gates and signals at the 20th Avenue Southeast crossing, the only one of six Benson crossings not currently protected by crossing gates.
The study found that there are currently 148,290 “vehicle-rail’’ exposures each day when traffic at the six crossings in Benson are tallied. Wolfington said he suspects the actual number is higher, as the study relied on 2009 train and motor vehicle counts. He and others in the city believe that train traffic is greater than the six to 13 trains per day reported by the railroad for 2009.
The study indicates that the solution many motorists would like to see, an overpass on the 14th Street crossing, is not likely in the near future. It would cost anywhere from $6.4 million to $10.5 million just to build the needed, 140-foot long “hump’’ at the required, eight percent grade. The overall costs would also be much higher, as utilities would need to be re-located, roadways re-configured, and a number of downtown businesses removed.
Also, the federal government requires a vehicle-rail exposure rate three times greater than exists at the crossings before it would consider funding an overpass project, noted Wolfington.
There remains one hole in the Stantec crossing study. Repeated requests by Stantec to the BNSF Railway Company for information on its planned scope of work to automate and improve switches and signals at the Benson crossings were not answered, the study pointed out.
Wolfington said city officials plan to meet with railroad and Minnesota Department of Transportation officials this summer as the first step towards pursuing a project. If the railroad and MnDOT support the proposal, requests for both state and federal funding will be made. City officials hope that state and federal funds could cover up to 90 percent of the costs, the city manager said.
Along with the safety concerns, the blocked crossings are a vexing issue for motorists in the city. The Morris and Appleton subdivision lines of the BNSF Railway Company meet outside of Benson, and train workers must throw a switch when trains change from one line to another.
The process requires a minimum of 10 minutes, and there have been cases where trains have blocked crossings for much longer periods. The Benson Police had issued citations to the BNSF for blocking the crossings last year, but the district court ruled that federal law protected the railroad and dismissed them.
