Daughter’s death spurs mom to petition for rail safety
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The Safety Equation
 | Michigan usually has enough money for about 80 rail-crossing improve-ment projects annually, but there are about 5,000 crossings in the state. Michigan is 13th in the nation in number of train collisions annually. |
By Cynthia Ramnarace and Charles Slat - Evening News staff writers
Across Monroe County, especially in rural areas, rail crossings often are little more than crossbucks and stop signs.
No lights, no bells, and the only whistle may be that of an oncoming train.
So why aren't all crossings decked out with gates, flashing lights and other safety devices typi-cal of more urban areas?
It all comes down to the amount of traffic and the amount of money.
Furthermore, rail crossing safety equipment is the responsibility of state government, not the railroads.
"The railroad has no control over where lights and gates will be," said Ken Gilsdorf, CSX public safety coordinator. "They can lobby for it, but they don't own the land to do it on their own."
"We can't afford to put lights and gates at all crossings," said Janet Foran, a spokeswoman with the Michigan Department of Transportation. "Each one costs about $125,000. It's not a simple thing. It's involved and expensive."
A crossing also has to meet spe-cific criteria to be improved, including average daily train traffic, crossing accident history num-ber of tracks and whether there's commercial or residential development in the area that might boost vehicle traffic. MDOT works with rail repre-sentatives, but it has specific guide-lines to develop a risk factor for a crossing - a factoring system that dovetails with standards that are used nationally.
All public crossings in Michigan- 5,000 in all, including 200 in Monroe County - are inspected every two years by a state team of four inspectors. "They are on the road basically all the time," Ms. Foran said.
Michigan has a budget of about $7 million a year to do crossing work. Ninety percent of
the money comes from the federal govern-ment and 10 percent from the state. That enables
the state to do about 80 crossing improvement projects a year, about 1 percent of all
cross-ings. "When you compare that to the total number of crossings In the state,
It's not a large percent-age," Ms. Foran said.
Improvements take a legal agree-ment between MDOT and the rail-road, so it's not uncommon
for that process to take up to 18 months to complete. But, Ms. Foran says, not all
crossings need lights, gates and bells.
"We believe a lot of people are under the misconception that because a crossing has gates or lights, it's safer. Actually, 50 percent of all crashes occur at crossings that do have lights and gates," she said.
Nine out of 10 fatalities involv-ing trains occur at highway-rail crossings or as a result of people trespassing on tracks, according to the Association of American Railroads.
Since 1973, $3.5 billion in federal money has gone into crossing safe-ty improvements. In addition, the railroads annually spend about $200 million to improve, operate and maintain their crossing equip-ment and rails.
In fiscal year 1999 alone, the U.S. Department of Transportation pro-vided $154.8 million to states to be used exclusively for highway-rail crossing improvements or elimi-nation. An additional $314.8 mil-lion, of funding for hazard elimination also may be used for eliminating or improving grade crossings.
As a result, federal officials say, annual crossing accident and fatal-ity rates have been reduced by over 65 percent since 1973. In fact, the Federal Highway Administration estimates that the federally backed improvement program has pre-vented nearly 10,000 fatalities and 40,000 serious injuries since 1974.
Federal Railroad Administrator Jolene Molitoris said the results have been even more dramatic in recent years.
"Five years ago we launched a multi-faceted initiative to save lives at highway-rail grade crossings and have achieved dramatic results -fewer highway-rail crossing col-lisions, fewer fatalities and fewer injuries," she said.
She said there have been 30 per-cent fewer highway-rail crossing collisions since 1993, 33 percent fewer highway-rail crossing fatal-ities and 31 percent fewer highway-rail crossing injuries.
In Monroe County the number of car-train accidents has remained relatively steady over the last three years. According to the Michigan State Police, nine crashes occurred in 1996, seven in 1997 and eight in 1998.
Often, people attempting to cross the tracks in their vehicle can misjudge the train's speed and dis-tance.
"Most people get frustrated about being blocked at a railroad crossing, " Mr. Gilsdorf said. "People say 'I don't have time to wait for the train.' The train is an inconvenience. Sometimes they take a chance."
The Federal Railroad Administration ranks Michigan 13th nationwide in the number of annual train collisions. So far this year, more than 100 crashes have occurred in the state, resulting in 11 deaths. Of those crashes, half occurred when drivers decided to snake around activated gates, Mr. Gilsdorf said.
If drivers understood how much power is riding on that train, maybe they wouldn't be so quick to do so, he added.
He explained that the average CSX train weighs 6,000 tons or 12 million pounds and can travel up to 50mph in Monroe. At that weight and speed, a train might travel a mile from the time the engineer hits the brakes until it comes to a full stop. Engineers sometimes are apprehensive about hitting the emergency brakes because of the potential damage a derailed train can do.
Because of the weight ratio, most cars simply will deflect off the train. A train hitting a car is the same proportionally as a car hit-ting a soda can, Mr. Gilsdorf said.
"If you do hit, because of the weight ratio between the locomo-tive and the car," Mr Gilsdorf says, "the car and everything in it is likely to be destroyed."
Daughter’s death spurs mom to petition for rail safety
By JOSHUA KENNEDY
Evening News staff writer
TEMPERANCE—Megan Tormoehlen died tragically.
A train at an unmarked crossing In Temperance on Jan. 26, 1992, killed the 19-year-old.
Nearly seven years later, her mother Debbie Tormoehlen, a champion of rail crossing safety throughout the state, can barely get through a sentence about Megan without crying.
"She was so beautiful," Mrs. Tormoehlen said in a recent interview. "My beautiful, blue-eyed girl."
Megan’s last few hours were spent with family and friends watching the 1992 Super Bowl at her uncle’s home.
"She wanted to go home and it wasn’t quite halftime," Mrs. Tormoehlen tearfully recalls. "It was weird. She went around hugging and kissing everyone goodbye. She kissed me goodbye last. She put her hands on my face and she kissed me and said goodbye."
Because Megan stopped at a friend’s house before heading home, Mrs. Tormoehlen got home before she did.
"And I got this call from Melissa (Megan’s younger sister)," Mrs. Tormoehlen said. "She was screaming and frantic. She said there’d been an accident."
Mrs. Tormoehlen was at first disbelieving. Then she saw the accident, including the twisted, mangled wreck of a 1984 Ford Escort that was Megan’s. "As I pulled up I could see Megan’s car," Mrs.Tormoehlen said. "I ran up to the officer and I asked where my daughter was.
"The sheriff said he needed to know who I was. I told him and asked again: Where’s Megan? He told me she didn’t make it," Mrs. Tormoehlen recalled, sobbing.
A mother acts
Instead of wallowing in misery, Mrs. Tormoehlen decided to act. She went to the
crossing and measured its perimeters and the setback of the stop sign.
She said she discovered that on the western side of the track, while the sign itself is at the correct distance, the angle of the track crossing the road is so great that even if you stopped at the sign correctly the front of your car would be in an oncoming train’s path.
Mrs. Tormoehlen found out that there had been two other accidents at the same crossing before Megan died.
"The engineer said Megan didn’t stop," Mrs. Tormoehlen said. "I’ll never know that."
Mrs. Tormoehlen started writing letters to her state legislators and to ones in nearby Ohio. Why aren’t there crossing gates at all the intersections? Why does it seem so arbitrarily enforced? Mrs. Tormoehlen wanted to know
Petitions circulated
The Tormoehlens eventually decided to sue. They sued everyone they and their
attorney could think of. The Ann Arbor Railroad Co. owned the track. The Norfolk and
Southern Railroad owned the train involved. The Monroe County Road Commission was
responsible for the road on which Megan was driving. All were named in a suit.
Through the discovery process, the Tormoehlen attorney found inspection documents pertaining to the crossing from 1987, 1989 and 1991. Two of the letters have notes scribbled on the edges by the field inspector telling his supervisor at the Ann Arbor Railroad Co. that something should be done about the crossing where Megan died.
Nothing was done, Mrs. Tormoehlen said, breaking into tears again. "If there were crossing gates at that intersection before, Megan would be alive today. That’s the bottom line."
At about the same time the lawsuit got under way at the Monroe County Courthouse, Mrs. Tormoehlen began circulating petitions.
Written in her own hand, the single sheets of paper simply asked whether all railroad crossings should be marked with flashing lights and gates or not. She took the petitions to work. She took them around to her neighbors. She took them anywhere else she thought people might be interested.
She’d send a sheet to her state representative every time one was filled up with signatures. "I turned them in the thousands," she said.
Mrs. Tormoehlen also went to Lansing with another mother of a train accident victim and squared off against the railroads when they tried to enact a law that would make it impossible to sue them.
Mrs. Tormoehlen said the committee room was packed full of lawyers for all the railroads. And, although she was nervous, Mrs. Tormoehlen and the other mother testified against the law.
"They didn’t get (it)," Mrs. Tormoehlen said. "The chairman listened to us, looked at the lobbyists for the railroad and said, ‘You know what? You’re right.’ The committee didn’t recommend the law and it never passed the House."
The lawsuit eventually was dismissed. The Ann Arbor Railroad Co. had owned the track at one time, but sometime before Megan was killed the company deeded the track to the state. "You can’t sue the state," Douglas Tormoehlen said.
Norfolk and Southern, the company that owned the train that killed Megan, was found by the courts to have been in compliance with the laws when the accident happened.
"(Norfolk and Southern) would have settled with us for $25,000 about a month after Megan died," Mr. Tormoehlen said. "I said hell no."
Gates installed
In the end, the Tormoehlens got nothing.
But since that time, Megan’s intersection has received crossing lights and a gate that warn of an approaching train. Mrs. Tormoehlen watched as workers installed the safety equipment.
It was a difficult time for her. "It was all I could do," she says now, crying, "not to walk over there and show them a picture of my beautiful daughter and tell them that she is the reason they were putting the lights up."