Podcast #4 - Railroads

The speaker talks about the impact of railroads in Holly, Michigan. They mention how the railroads bisect the town and discuss the two main rail lines, Lake States Railroad and Canadian National. The speaker also shares the historical significance of railroads in Holly, including their role in the town's development and transportation of goods. They mention some incidents involving trains, such as derailments and accidents. The speaker recounts their own experience with a beaver dam near the railroad tracks and their attempt to report it to the authorities. They express sympathy for the people in East Palestine, Ohio, who are dealing with a train derailment and express concerns about the potential long-term effects of such incidents. Good morning and welcome to Sherilyn's Pearls from Holly on SoundCloud. It's Monday, March 6, 2023, and I can hardly believe we are two months into the new year. I hope you came out of this latest snowstorm in good condition, and I am personally grateful that we in Holly avoided a serious ice storm this time. I do want my podcast today to be about the railroads in Holly. You can't live here without having them affect your life. They bisect our town, and we alternately love them and hate them. They keep us awake at night, or they wake us up when we don't hear them. We always have a logical and believable excuse for being late, even if it might be frustrating. In addition, these two railroad corridors are vital transportation lines through the state of Michigan. Every morning I look out at the Lake States Railroad trains as they run over the bridge at the east end of Stifts Mill Pond here in Holly. Lake States, which by the way has the noisiest diesel engines of any of the train lines, runs north from Milford through Clyde and Rose Center. It's the railroad crossing at the freeway stop at Milford and South Holly Roads. The line runs through town and intersects Sherman and Maple Streets and Grange Hall Roads. It heads on out of town along North Holly Road, eventually to Grand Blanc, Flint, Midland, and beyond. The Lake States Railroad southern terminus is Plymouth, Michigan. From Plymouth, it runs south to Detroit Metro Airport as the CSX transportation line. The other railroad that runs through Holly is the Canadian National. It comes northwest up through Pontiac and its actual terminus is at the Detroit River and the Canadian Pacific Rail Line on through the tunnel east into Canada. I know this railroad best as coming up from Davisburg and entering the village at the southeast corner. It cuts off the Rose Township neighborhood at the end of Coxhill Street just before it intersects the Lake States Railroad at Sherman Street and Grant Street. It crosses Broad and Saginaw Streets at the south end of downtown and from Holly, the CN runs northwest to Duran. You wouldn't be surprised to know that much of Holly's history is built on the railroads. Do you know why they call it Rattly Lake Road? Because the workers reported literally killing hundreds of rattlesnakes every day when laying the track between here and Davisburg along the Shiawassee River. If you don't already know, the circus murals in Battle Alley and in Battle Alley Brewery reflect the real impact of circus culture on Holly. After all, trains were the way they got around the country back then. My dad Skip showed us the remains of the stone animal stalls when we were kids. It seems that James Anthony Bailey of Barnum and Bailey fame had a brother known here as Doc Bailey, who owned the house that still stands on corner of Sherman and College Streets. With the railroad intersection just steps away, his backyard became the perfect staging area for supplies, equipment, all kinds of people, all kinds of animals. The Holly Train Depot, which is a National Historic Site, was decommissioned in 1964 when the Grand Trunk Western Railroad ceased passenger operations through Holly. Prior to that, it was a damn busy place. Grain, lumber, and finished goods like the Grinnell pianos that were built here were loaded and shipped out across the world. Politicians, including George H.W. Bush in 1992, loved to hang out the back of a train caboose on their whistle-stop campaigns across the state. This is important. The railroads were a main attraction for the manufacturing businesses that thrived in Holly in its earlier days. First it was lumber, then grain, Heinz pickles and Grinnell pianos, Holly trailers and springs from the Holly Spring factory, big foundry machines from Sutter's, and steel from Delta Tube all depended on the railroads. And there were the little stories. I'm sure my mom Charlotte wasn't the only one to bust out of this town on the train. In her case, she took the train to Pontiac to attend Pontiac Business School and start her career as a legal secretary. Train, train, take me on out of this town. Well, in case you hadn't guessed, I picked trains to talk about because of what's happening in East Palestine, Ohio. Since we live so close to Sherman and Grant Streets, I've always told Jim the most likely disaster to follow us would be something related to the trains. I have also told him that we should have a grab and go bag packed and ready just in case we are ever evacuated like those four folks in Ohio. Full disclosure, we do not have a grab and go bag packed, not yet, but it is on the to-do list. I'm also thinking what it's been like to live by these trains my whole life. It was great fun to put a coin out on the tracks and then stand back and see if we could make the train derail. I don't think a train ever derailed from a coin, but I am sure there are a lot of flattened coins in the top drawers of dressers around Holly. And honestly, I actually don't mind sitting at crossings because I get to take in the graffiti on all of the cars as they go by, even if it's a little annoying. Just think about it. We get a moving art exhibit through our town several times a day and it's totally free. But there is scariness with the trains as well. There have been suicides and accidental deaths on the tracks around here. There have been a few car train wrecks. When I asked for stories on the Facebook group, I Grew Up in Holly, someone told of sitting in the Red Devil and watching a set of wheels fly off a tanker car and end up in someone's yard. They thought all of Maple Street might have to be evacuated. We used to call the Thursday night train coming from Dow Chemical in Midland the Death Train. I believe it had a special whistle when it came through town, so we would know which train it was. In 1979, a train derailed in Davisburg. There wasn't a lot of damage, but there were plenty of rumors at the time about sabotage. But 2003 was the big derailment that I remember. Just north of town and east of North Holly Road, a train went off the tracks. People on Deer Run Trail had to be evacuated. Seven cars and an engine were involved in flying off the rails. Environmental services had to clean up spilled diesel fuel. It was rumored that the railroad cars were full of new vehicles that eventually had to be scrapped. The recovery even involved building a road to access the accident site. The cleanup and restoration took months. As it was, the cause of this derailment turned out to be beavers. Yep, you heard me right. Beavers. The little guys had made a dam that caused flooding, which eroded the ground under the tracks and caused the damage. This takes me to my own experience with Lake States Railroad a couple of years ago, and I have my own beaver dam story. You know how they say, see something, say something? Well, I'm pretty sure it was the spring of 2021 and Jim and I noticed the level of the mill pond going down rather drastically. We took the kayaks out and quickly found the beavers were stuffing a new dam into the culvert under the tracks on the east end of the mill pond. There was already a drop of at least 10 inches in the water level from the east side of the tracks to the west side of the tracks, so we thought it was a serious enough threat that it should be reported. We first called the emergency number that's posted at the railroad crossing at Milford Road. The snippy lady who answered the phone told me she only took reports on crossing signals. I next called the Holly Police Department and wonderful Officer Bob came over and we talked about the situation. He said he would send it up the chain of command and also because he's a sportsman himself, he was going to call a friend who's a beaver trapper to see if he could help remove the beavers. My next call was to Lake States Railroad to the number on their website that said, we take safety seriously. Let us know if you see anything. Well, the woman on the end of that line didn't see any reason for my concern. Even when I explained to her our previous local derailment, she didn't see the beaver dam as an imminent threat. Trying another tact, I asked her that if by her logic she meant, should I see terrorists planting dynamite on the bridge? Do you want me to call you when I see them planting it or wait until they're lighting it because then it would be an imminent threat? She told me my sarcasm would get me nowhere and she was right. So, I finally sent an email to Lake States Railroad Safety Department. I explained the beaver situation. I explained why I thought it was a threat. The response that I got, I'm sure, was from some nice intern who drafted an email to me to assure me that all of their bridge inspections were current and up-to-date and I had nothing to worry about. In the end, I believe it was finally the Rose Township supervisor who got the attention of Lake States Railroad. One afternoon, we saw one of those cool trucks out there that runs on trains. That runs on train wheels and a couple of guys checking out the culvert. We figured they could use some help so we jumped in our kayaks and went out to talk to them. Wow, they were shocked and couldn't believe that two guys with a rowboat and a couple of poles weren't able to get that beaver dam dislodged. A couple of days later, we saw a truck on the tracks with a big winch like a tow truck and a boat and four men with poles and it took them half a day to finally drag that beaver dam out of there. So, that's my personal experience in dealing with the railroad. I have total sympathy with the people of New Palestine who don't believe anything that they are being told by Norfolk Southern Railroad. I am not a chemist and I am not a biologist, but I am sure that the long-term fallout from that train derailment is yet to be determined. Also, I just have to believe the same chemicals that are polluting East Palestine are also on the trains we see coming through our town every day. And like most railroads, our tracks are built along waterways, primarily following the Shia Rossi River and Swartz Creek, but also bordering hundreds of lakes, ponds and marshes along their routes. I shudder to think of the devastation a toxic derailment could cause in our community. Over the last week, I have counted as few as three tanker cars on a train and as many as 70. Yes, seven zero tanker cars on one train. And here's the part where I'm going to get political. I don't really care who showed up to get their picture taken or a highlight reel of them drinking the water for the six o'clock news. We live near Flint, remember? We've seen this show before. I do care that trains over a mile long get to run with only one human being on board. I do care that a single train was carrying five different chemicals and no one is quite sure what kind of killer soup they may end up creating and leaving in this devastation in Ohio. I do care that even though there were 20 cars of known toxic substances on that train, because it was also carrying some wheat and vegetables, it didn't have to be labeled as hazardous and no one in the state had to be notified it was coming through. I do care that cameras picked up the burning wheel bearings, but no one seems to be monitoring the monitors. I do care that Norfolk Southern was able to load up trucks and ship that shit out to other states, including ours, before anyone knew what was going on. That's what deregulation looks like, my friends. Regulations enacted in 2014 would have required high-hazard trains to have faster braking systems by 2023, but those regulations were repealed in 2017. In typical starve-the-beast tactics, the number of railroad inspectors hired for the job has been cut by budget restrictions over the years. There's not enough people to do the inspections. I fully believe this is what cutting government regulations and cutting government red tape ultimately looks like. Industry gets to call the shots until it all goes to hell, then the people of New Palestine, Ohio, or maybe Holly, Michigan, pay the price. I don't have the answers. I just know we have to do better. I can't bear the thought of our precious rivers, lakes, and wetlands being destroyed by greed or our people being sickened. In the meantime, pack your grab bag, grab-and-go bag, and let's show some sympathy for those Rosetownship people who live at the end of Coxhill Street. They do get trapped in or out from time to time, and with only one or two humans on any given train at a time, that situation isn't going to change. So I offer this suggestion. Maybe the North Oakland County Fire Authority could install a do-it-yourself emergency aid station in that neighborhood, something with an AED, some Narcan, EpiPens, and a first aid kit and instructions. Maybe, just in case. Well, thanks for listening to Sherilyn's Pearls from Holly on SoundCloud. You can comment on my Facebook page, Sherilyn's Pearls from Holly, and if you like, please share this podcast and the others that I have that are living on SoundCloud right now. Until then...