When I sat down with John Lumsden and his family in the spring of 2015, it had been almost 40 years since his 14-year-old daughter, Laura, had been killed in a car/train collision at a railroad crossing on New Hope Road. At the time of the crash, that crossing didn’t have warning lights or gates, the kind of equipment proven to greatly reduce these kinds of accidents.
Soon after Laura’s death, safety equipment was installed at that crossing.
John Lumsden still teared up talking about his daughter as he shared his family’s efforts to have similar warning devices added to the crossing at Beersheba Road just a quarter-mile south of his home. In 1994, a car collided with a train at the crossing. That non-fatal collision, along with the haunting memory of Laura’s death, inspired Lumsden to begin what turned out to be an 11-year campaign to add warning devices at the Beersheba Road crossing.
It didn’t get off to a promising start.
“I started talking to people around the community,” Lumsden said. “We finally organized a meeting at the church. About 75 people showed up and the man from the railroad came to hear what we had to say.”
The meeting did not go as Lumsen hoped.
“He just ran over us,” Lumsden said. “That railroad man was a big man, about 6-foot-7. He could have thrown me through a window. And he wasn’t having none of it. He was loud, angry. He had one little old lady in tears. He said there wasn’t enough traffic on the road and they weren’t going to do anything. I guess you could say he rail-roaded us.”
The Lumsden family didn’t give up the fight, though. They regularly made their case to the board of supervisors and MDOT officials.
John Lumsden, who passed away at age 82 in January of 2016, lived long enough to be notified that warning devices would be added to the Beersheba Road crossing, The equipment was installed in 2017.
His reaction to the news was pretty simple.
“You know, when Laura died, they put up safety devices at the New Hope Road crossing right away,” he said. “For a long time, it seemed like the only way to get that done was for somebody to get killed. It shouldn’t have to come to that.”
The story I wrote back in 2015 has stayed with me. Each time I hear of car-train collisions, I think of John Lumsden and his family.
Those memories returned when I heard about another car/train collision in the New Hope area. A mother and her four children were injured during the late-morning collision on the Halbert Road crossing late Saturday morning. Fortunately, none of the injuries were life-threatening.
These kinds of collisions aren’t as rare as you might suspect. According to the U.S. Transportation Safety Administration,each year there are, on average, 2,200 car/train collisions, resulting in 200 deaths and hundreds of injuries.
The causes for these accidents are many, but one of the best safeguards are the flashing lights, crossing gates and warning bells that alert drivers to an oncoming train. The statistics bear this out. The 46% of U.S. crossings that don’t have warning equipment account for 60% of those car/train accidents.
State transportation agencies aren’t too keen about adding these warning devices. After all, it costs between $200,000 and $300,000 to install lights and gates at a crossing.
In 2022, Congress passed a five-year grant program providing $3 billion for railroad crossing improvements. In Fiscal Year 2022, the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) awarded $570 million in Railroad Crossing Elimination grants to projects in 32 states that addressed more than 400 crossings. But most of those funds are not used to equip rural crossings with warning devices though.
Big projects near population centers benefit the most. Mississippi’s most recent grant was a $1.2 million project for a railroad overpass at one congested crossing in the coastal city of Gautier.
The money spent to ease congestion in Gautier is enough to outfit six-to-12 rural crossings with warning devices.
Putting comfort ahead of life-saving equipment is not how these funds should be spent.
Can you really apply a cost/benefit calculation on something where lives are at stake?
Unfortunately, the answer to that question in Mississippi, is “yes, you can.”
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].
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