An accident is waiting to happen in Harvard, the small McHenry County city that has become an unwilling example of what happens when you get caught between a fast-moving railroad and a slow-moving bureaucracy.
The potential accident site, as most Harvard residents know, is the Union Pacific Railroad crossing at Diggins Street, one of the busiest east-west routes through town. It always was a possible hazard, but became more so last October when the Union Pacific–in the name of efficiency–increased the speed of its freight trains through Harvard from 10 m.p.h. to 40 m.p.h.
That’s no big deal under ordinary circumstances, but the Diggins Street crossing isn’t ordinary in a growing community. It has no warning gates to stop traffic when trains are passing through and, worse, visibility of the tracks is poor because of nearby buildings–this at a crossing that carries some 3,000 vehicles, including several school buses, each day in competition with up to 10 freight trains.
An accident waiting to happen, indeed.
What Harvard officials want, and should get, are crossing gates. What they are up against is the frustratingly measured pace of the Illinois Commerce Commission, the agency with jurisdiction and until recently no obvious sense of urgency in the matter.
Harvard first learned about the lower speeds last July, when it rejected the Union Pacific’s laughable proposal to simply close the crossing. It has been lobbying for some kind of solution ever since, but the ICC said it was bound to hold a public hearing first and didn’t get around to that until late February.
Now, though an ICC hearing officer recommends the gates, the ICC still must act, and it could take up to 18 months after that for the railroad to install gates. Harvard should count on luck and caution until then.
It should not, of course, ever have come to this. Union Pacific should have held off on its plans until a safety solution was worked out–though it may have had some inkling that if it had waited on the ICC, it still would be waiting.
In any event, that train–as they say in the railroad business–has left the station, and the issue now is for the ICC and the railroad to get moving on the remedy. They are still waiting in Harvard.
