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Stored UP rail cars seen as blight on Brentwood
(The following story by Rowena Coetsee appeared on the Contra Costa Times website on November 5, 2009.)
BRENTWOOD, Calif. — Brentwood officials and residents are protesting a nuisance they say dozens of mothballed railcars are creating.
For weeks, Union Pacific Railroad has parked a string of freight cars on its tracks in Brentwood, exasperating nearby residents who consider them a blight.
Storing cars next to housing developments has been an intractable problem for some residents in East Contra Costa County, where Union Pacific has moved the railcars around on its otherwise unused Mococo line that stretches from Martinez to Tracy.
This summer, some Bay Point residents received a temporary reprieve after getting an eyeful of the cars — some spray-painted with offensive language and gang markings — for several years.
Pittsburg, Antioch and Oakley also have served as staging areas for the cars at various times.
In Brentwood, the City Council last week agreed to send a letter to Union Pacific urging the company to move the cars to a more rural area.
One month ago, the company trundled them from just north of Lone Tree Way to the other side of the road — good for anyone living in the Rose Garden subdivision, but bad for those in Sterling Preserve.
"Yeah, you really solved the problem, didn't you?" said an irritated David Fletcher, who lives in the Sterling subdivision. "Wherever you park them they're in somebody's neighborhood."
Although there's a sound wall opposite the Fletchers' home, the railcars are even taller
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and block the couple's view of Mount Diablo.
What makes the situation even harder to accept is that the Fletchers inquired about plans for the Mococo line before they bought the home, Liz Beth Fletcher added, noting that city employees told them the tracks hadn't been used in decades.
She and her husband have complained repeatedly both to Union Pacific and Brentwood officials, she said.
They said railroad officials have stopped returning their calls and City Council members, although sympathetic, point out they can't dictate what Union Pacific does on its own property.
Still, the Fletchers want to know why Union Pacific doesn't move the cars to less densely populated areas closer to Tracy. For the company to store them right next to their neighborhood is tantamount to thumbing its nose at them, David Fletcher said.
"To me, it feels like (they're saying), 'We want to prove that this is our property and we can do whatever we feel like,' " he said.
Union Pacific officials said the economic downturn has reduced the demand for rail transport, forcing it to park cars on unused tracks.
In an April 28 letter to all four East County mayors and the region's two county supervisors, the company said it has sidelined 23 percent of the approximately 66,000 cars it has throughout the country.
And last week, Tom Lange, Union Pacific's director of corporate communications, reiterated the message in an e-mail to this newspaper, saying it's impossible to predict when Union Pacific will be able to return the cars to service.
The company stores them where they won't interfere with its network of tracks but still can be accessed easily when needed, he added.
As for residents' gripes, they can blame the city — not Union Pacific, Lange said.
"It is unfortunate that the local jurisdictions involved did not require the appropriate mitigations from developers who placed housing directly next to an active rail line," he wrote.
Friday, November 06, 2009
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