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The Sadler Avenue neighborhood may be one of Nashville’s best-kept secrets. Forty-four homes, some newly renovated by house-proud residents, line tidy, tree-shaded streets. Located off of Nolensville Road between the Fairgrounds and I-440, it’s a working-class neighborhood that in recent years has cleaned the grit from beneath its fingernails. New arrivals have spruced up trash-cluttered yards and, not long ago, residents formed a neighborhood association.
There isn’t much traffic here, mostly because the neighborhood only has two streets, Sadler Avenue and a cul-de-sac called Sadler Court. Children can ride bikes outside until after dark while squirrels romp in the trees overhead. Off in the distance a train whistle blows. The train comes closer and, as it does, the whistle grows ever louder.
And this is where the problems begin on Sadler Avenue.
The Sadler neighborhood is located smack in the middle of a triangle formed by three sets of railroad tracks all owned and operated by the CSX railroad company. There is only one way in or out of the neighborhood, and that is to head south on Sadler Avenue over a set of train tracks. The problem with this, say neighborhood residents, is that CSX often parks boxcars—miles of them—on the crossing for up to two hours, effectively trapping residents in the neighborhood. Worse, it has prevented EMTs, police and the fire department from responding to emergencies.
“It’s not a matter of if somebody will get hurt or even killed because of that train blocking the street,” says Sadler resident Kenneth Watson. “It’s a matter of when.”
Brad Fischer almost became Sadler Avenue’s first casualty. The 71-year-old requires heart and respiratory medication, and must adhere to a tight schedule for taking those prescriptions. “One evening I was coming home to get my meds,” he recalls, “and a train was blocking the roadway.”
Fischer says that while waiting, he started to hyperventilate. “I was about to pass out, but I managed to call 911.”
Metro police and EMS workers arrived with sirens blaring. It became clear to them that Fischer would need his meds, and soon. He says that the Metro officials called CSX but to no avail. The train didn’t budge.
“I had to give my keys to [an EMT], and he had to climb over the train,” Fischer says. The EMT had to “walk to my house, find the meds and bring them back to me…. The train was still there when he got back. He had to climb over the train again to get back to me.”
EMTs aren’t the only ones who are forced to climb CSX’s parked boxcars.
Helen Stalons, who’s lived in the neighborhood for 39 years, says that she sees children crawl under or over the trains “at least once a week” to catch the school bus. The bus stop is on the other side of the tracks, and if the kids don’t want to miss their ride, they have little choice.
“Some’ll go under the train, and some’ll crawl over,” she says of the children who must risk their lives to get to school.
Some Sadler Avenue residents are also wary of the contents of the trains that sit in their midst unguarded for hours. Nate Daniels, a Ph.D. candidate studying chemistry at Vanderbilt, says he recognizes many of the symbols that decorate the shipping containers riding the rails past his house.
“There’s huge canisters of sulfur and hydrogen peroxide,” he says.
The thought of a chemical accident worries neighborhood resident Adora Bruce. “If there’s a derailment and chemical spill, they can’t get us out of here,” she says.
Residents say that, until recently, CSX has ignored their complaints. They say that when they called the nearby Radnor switching yard to complain of parked trains, their concerns were dismissed. Those who call the CSX customer service “blocked crossing” hotline sometimes get friendlier treatment, but the outcome is the same.
Teresa Bates called the hotline last January to lodge a complaint about a parked train. Shortly thereafter, she received what appears to be a computer-generated letter of apology—“We apologize for the inconvenience…. The cause of the blocked crossing is under investigation”—along with a reference number for her complaint.
Bates called again to follow up. When she gave them the reference number for her complaint, they “didn’t know what I was talking about,” she says. “They had never heard of me or my complaint,” says Bates, who worked at Nashville Scene until about 2001.
Unfortunately, the law may be on CSX’s side.
According to the Federal Railroad Administration, there are no federal laws governing blocked crossings. It’s left up to the states to determine what punishment, if any, should be meted out to rail companies that abuse crossings like the one on Sadler Avenue.
In Louisiana, blocking a crossing for more than 25 minutes will cost a railroad $500, with the fines increasing every five minutes. In Rhode Island, a blockage of more than five minutes amounts to a fine of between $25 and $100.
In 2005, the city of Toledo, Ohio, took CSX to court for parking its trains too long on the city’s crossings, obstructing traffic and emergency vehicles. It leveled $14,000 in fines to the company for violating Ohio rail laws.
Unfortunately, Tennessee has no such legislation, which leaves the denizens of Sadler Avenue with little recourse.
Anna Page, who represents the neighborhood in the Metro Council, says that she and state Rep. Janis Sontany have stepped in to make the situation a little more livable. “I sent all of the addresses in that triangle to the 911 dispatch,” she says. “Anytime that a call originates from one of those households, a number from CSX pops up so emergency services can inform CSX. The only thing that would solve the problem would be if CSX decided to never use that track. They’ve informed us that will never happen.”
The elected officials also helped bring together a meeting between CSX officials and neighborhood residents last month.
Many neighborhood residents thought the meeting with CSX was productive. Within 24 hours of the discussion, a CSX official sent an email calling the residents’ concerns “extremely legitimate.” The next day, a CSX cleanup crew began clearing some debris from the crossing.
“They are at least listening,” says Bates.
The Tennessee Department of Transportation says that CSX may not have heeded the Sadlerites complaints because the railroad crossing was accidentally deleted from a state database during the construction of I-440. TDOT says that the error has been corrected.
Many in the Sadler Avenue neighborhood are still wary of CSX and believe that the initial improvements are a PR stunt to pacify the united neighbors. They say that the tracks were cleaned up so quickly only because of a new agreement by Metro and CSX that requires the railroad to clean up 24 trash-strewn areas that the city identified as “hotspots.” Sadler Avenue was one of them.
Those who attended the meeting noted with surprise that Mark McNeely, founder of Nashville’s McNeely Pigott & Fox, one of the Southeast’s largest PR firms, was also there.
“This whole thing makes CSX look very, very bad,” says Todd Smith, who lives in the neighborhood.
McNeely, who represents CSX, is on vacation for three weeks and could not be reached for comment, but CSX spokeswoman Jane Covington confirms that for many years the railroad had no idea that the crossing existed. She says that Sadler is now on their radar and they have taken appropriate steps. She points to a new procedure that prohibits trains from stopping at the crossing for any reason other than emergencies.
Smith isn’t buying it.
“On November 5th, weeks after our meeting, a train was stopped there for 40 minutes,” says Smith, reading from a log he keeps of train blockages.
At a recent neighborhood meeting, residents gathered to eat chili and swap train stories.
There were tales of docked pay, missed exams and furious phone calls to CSX that did nothing. “The minute you’re running a couple of minutes late for work or a doctor’s appointment” says resident Kenneth Watson, “that train is there and it’s not moving.”
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