Improvements may soon be coming to Plymouth’s railroad crossings. The city has been getting complaints for months about their condition, but city officials have had some difficulty getting in contact with the railroad companies.
On Monday, though, City Attorney Sean Surrisi told the Board of Works that progress is finally being made on the crossings on Jefferson and Harrison Streets. “I finally did make contact with someone, and my communications from several months ago had been routed to a guy who is not with the company anymore and that’s where the communication had broken down,” he said. “But they said they would send people out to take a look at it, and actually today, the mayor and I just happened to be driving down Harrison and there was a railroad crew there. So we stopped and talked with them. This is folks from Pioneer Railroad, and they were examining that crossing and were getting ready to go to Jefferson.” The crew plans to repair the crossing with the same type of materials they used at the Oak Road crossing.
Surrisi said he’s also getting in touch with the officials at Genesee & Wyoming, which owns the other railroad running through the town, the Chicago, Fort Wayne & Eastern, thanks to some contact information provided by Senator Joe Donnelly’s staff, “The contacts that we had before were for more local maintenance people, but we hope to kind of have a comprehensive discussion with them about the ideas that we had had about exploring a quiet zone, refurbishing the viaduct and those crossings. So we wanted to kind of pull back and see if we could talk to some of the higher-level folks there and get a meeting set or a conference call or something.”
Discussions on the upgrades are expected to continue.
