Canadian Pacific Railway and the city of St. Paul will host an open house at 6 p.m. today, April 23, at the Battle Creek Rec Center on plans to expand the CP rail yard down by Pig’s Eye Lake. The major expansion would add 3,000 feet to each of CP’s six existing tracks near the Mississippi River.
The details were covered in the Pioneer Press last Sunday, and they include filling in six acres of wetlands by Pig’s Eye Lake to make the expansion possible. Wetlands would be added or protected elsewhere in exchange.
Ramsey County envisions freight rail will increase by leaps and bounds in the east metro corridor, and CP Railway claims longer tracks accommodating 10,000-foot-long trains will actually decrease idling time and noise for neighbors as freight traffic picks up. Some residents, as Scoop readers can see below, are dubious that bigger trains will lead to less noise.
Public comments on the project’s Environmental Assessment Worksheet are due by April 30, and a wide cast of characters are already weighing in. Here’s a snapshot of folks who have reached out to the Scoop, and their reactions range from outrage to outrage over the outrage:
A longtime resident of Winthrop Street in the Highwood river bluffs area identified himself only by the initial V. as in Victor. He took no issue with the expansion:
“Personally, my wife and I see no problem with the rail yard expanding. Anybody who has a problem with the noise, they shouldn’t have moved in here in the first place. … We’ve been here for 40 years. The trains haven’t bothered us. We do hear the trains braking, and we say ‘no problem at all.’ Whoever it’s affecting shouldn’t really have a complaint, because it’s commerce. … It’s like living next to an airport, too. You move into the area, you can expect whatever’s there.”
CP Rail spokesman Ed Greenberg is quoted in the article mentioned above as saying:
“Our railroad is looking at making the yard more efficient for train operations, which will reduce train congestion and idling, as well as noise related to switching operations,” said Canadian Pacific spokesman Ed Greenberg.
“The yard was built in the 1950s and requires modifications to our railroad’s ability to respond to local customers in the cities, as well as our work to support the American economy,” Greenberg said. “This is an extension of existing tracks. We take the environmental review process very seriously.”
Former City Council Member Kiki Sonnen has a far different take. CP Rail has been guarded about the kinds of materials it’s trains will be transporting, except to say they run the gamut. Sonnen has been active in efforts to preserve Pig’s Eye as a natural area for egrets and herons. She authored this written comment to the city:
“I am sure that you will agree that no one is above the law – not even CP Railroad. Maybe in the olden days E. L. Harriman, James J. Hill, and their ilk could run roughshod over our communities but I hope we have a new rule of law for today’s civil society.
Here’s the deal: CP Railroads’ operations in the Pig’s Eye area is a finite resource. They cannot be allowed to expand into our wetlands and incur upon protected park lands any more than they be allowed to incur onto Hwy 61 right of way and traffic lanes. How wonderful that their business is exploding from the need to transport silica sand to the frac mines of the Dakotas and coal, oil and gas from the Powder River Basin. But there simply is not enough room at Pig’s Eye to accommodate CP Railways’ pipe dreams.”
Paul Johnson is a former railroad cop, having spent 34 years with BNSF Railroad Police. He’s very familiar with the area in question, and he’s got his own concerns. This, via email:
“I patrolled that area, east of our Dayton’s Bluff rail yard and it is a beautiful area filled with wildlife. …Basically they are saying to let us destroy 6 acres of prime wetlands and we’ll …what… manufacture new wetlands some place else? And the part about less idling because they’ll increase train length from 7000 to 1000 feet. This is also smoke and mirrors. If the CP wants to make room for longer trains, how in the heck do they think that that will decrease idle time? I spent 30 years patrolling the Twin Cities out of the Northtown Yard in Fridley and I’ll tell you that any large rail yard has engines idling all over the place and to make the claim that there is a correlation between length of trains in a large yard and idling time for the power is completely absurd.”
Tom Dimond, another longtime St. Paul activist, has a similar take. He believes the railroad company is shuffling operations across its service area, which covers 13 U.S. states and six Canadian provinces, and he’s worried about the types of materials that will end up in St. Paul:
“State and City Regulations prohibit the proposal. R-1 residential zoning does not allow rail yards. The MN DNR designates Pig’s Eye a Natural Environment Lake (MN Wetland Regulations). St Paul Critical Area regulations prohibit any structure (steel piling wall) within 200 feet of the OHW. The wall runs right to the water’s edge. State and City Critical Area regulations prohibit expansion of existing commercial and industrial in the State designated Urban Open Space District.
This proposal will increase noise and reduce safety. The proposal is part of CP’s plan to double the daily number of cars in this and other yards by closing yards and shifting those cars to the protected wetlands of our waterfront. Doubling of the cars will increase noise and will increase the traffic into the yard. It will also negatively impact safety.
Doubling the volume of a mix of hazardous and flammable materials abutting the lake shore and planned regional park trail and in close proximity to the single family residential neighborhood, significantly increases the risks to environment, homeowners, workers, park, and trail users. Relocating hazardous and flammable materials from other locations and concentrating them in a residential neighborhood on our waterfront is foolhardy at best. It is also prohibited by State and City regulations.”
A reader who goes by the name Fair20064 has this to say, over email:
“Just recently I have become involved with the CP rail issues, while other residents have been fighting for years. The Battle Creek Area USED to be somewhat quiet then with TOTAL disregard for the residents in the neighborhood CP raid decided to expand and expand they did again with total disregard for wild life and residents alike. After years of correspondences with CP Rail from my fellow neighbors and just recently myself to try and help alleviate some of the noise issues which is occurring on a 24/7 basis it has become crystal clear that CP rail has a total disregard for residents in the neighborhood which they have invaded. To illustrate their total disregard for the residents CP rail wants to expand even MORE into the area thus creating more noise so that they can reap their profits at our expense
On their website it states things you should know before moving by a railroad. The railroad moved in on us with their expansion.
It is impossible to sleep with the windows open due to all the train noise CP has created.Some include….
Locomotives left running throughout the night.
Coupling of cars smashing together which shakes the houses.
Loud screeching noise from brakes
Train horns blasting.”
Tom Brown, a resident of Point Douglas Road, says noise has increased over time, and he’s not sure whether longer trains will, as CP Rail claims, lessen train noise or increase it:
“Basically, the CP Railroad yard here is just an absolute nightmare to the residents in the neighborhood. … I’m not for (the expansion) and I’m not against it because I don’t know enough about it. I’ve been fighting with the residents for the last five or six years. The railroads are just unresponsive. They don’t care. They’re governed by the federal government, and all the rules and regulations were made in 1976. Well, in 1976 they weren’t quite as restrictive as they should have been. The engines idling all night long right across from my house — sometimes there will be six engines out there idling for hours on end. They’ll bring up a train, and the yard people will let it idle for hours and hours.”
So what about you, dear Scoop reader? How do you feel about Canadian Pacific Railway’s major rail yard expansion?