This subject has been covered by Sun Community News. Pete PeMola has written about it often.
The heavier aspect of rail traffic in The Park travels through ESSEX every night: chlorine gas and oil. The chlorine ends up at International Paper. IP employs many. Few like it. Health care drives many. The oil ends up at a tank farm near Albany. Air, truck, auto and homes are served.
But the track storage is different. This approach warehouses the unused oil convoy carcass. Mother Nature notices.
And Pete DeMola covered it.
The Park is our home. Parking oil dripping storage carcasses unused in the oil glut makes no sense. Taken to their manufacturer they would be refreshed and repurposed.
How about that?
Doesn't seem to be particularly disruptive, and someone is being paid 750 000 a year to work on a short 30 miles of track, although part of that is probably local taxes. The tracks have been there longer than most residents have been alive, and even with tank cars on the tracks the pictures imply you can't see the tank cars from very far away due to the forest.
A quiet row of empty tank cars is better than a never ending series of rock hauling cargo trains, the intended hypothetically more profitable use of the trackage.
If one doesn't like the tank cars, the current owner would very likely sell out to some person of private means who would then tear up the tracks and quietly continue to pay the taxes forever to reduce community impact.
If you dont want to look at trains, dont buy a house near the tracks.
Railroading is a vital and important business.
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Storing empty railroad cars is also happening in NE Pennsylvania on now unused tracks that snaked through anthracite coal mining towns in the 1950s. Only the railroad cars are not in forests, but people's back yards. Yes, they are clean and empty but who wants to look at that every day -- and what does that do to property values?
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We need to encourage more rail use, not undermine with with NIMBYism
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Not the kind of rail use that should be encouraged, quite the opposite. These are abandoned oil tankers being stored on lines that will actually prohibit a positive use of the rails. Like other waste, there is no good method for "disposing" of these old cars. How can a model for moving tankers to unused lines and leaving them there to rot be considered anything but an environmental issue? This is not "much ado about nothing" as another comment suggested; there's only so much cleaning that can be done and it will not guarantee leaking oil.
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Much ado about nothing. Clean and empty rail cars do not harm the environment.
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Tear up the tracks!
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“If there’s an opportunity to make money,’’ Mr. Ellis said, “you make money.”
This sums up everything wrong with our country.
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Well said, Thinker.
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For those of us who are not independently wealthy, as you seem to be, there is nothing wrong with a company making money legally. That is what pays our salaries, you know.
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Mike, unfortunately there’s a big difference between legal and ethical actions in many cases. It’s the difference between positive and natural law.
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