SOUTH COFFEYVILLE, Okla. — Residents and town officials at the Oklahoma-Kansas border feel ignored and at the mercy of a railroad corporation halting local transportation multiple times a day.
"If the train's here of course, we have to go sometimes a mile south up to five miles south to go a mile west then come back just to get to this side of the tracks because the train is stopped and has blocked both intersections," South Coffeyville Chief of Police Wade Lamb said. "And when there's three-mile trains stacked up, it blocks all the way to Highway 10, which is about five miles that way down the road."
The blocked railroad crossings add up to 20 minutes to first responder response time, Chief Lamb said.
The chief added that when it took almost a half-hour for backup to arrive at a DUI traffic stop in late August due to a stationary train, he contacted the 2 News Problem Solvers.
"My dad had a heart attack in 2020," Lamb said. "The ambulance came this way and the train was stopped, so it had to go back through Coffeyville (Kansas) and come around. It was about eight miles out of the way."
"(A freight train) will be parked for four and a half hours, (maybe) five," longtime South Coffeyville resident and former police chief Mike Talbott said. "This last year has been terribly bad. You know, we worry about fire."
The men point to the Coffeyville, Kansas Union Pacific switch station a mile north as the cause for the stalls. It's where train engineers make a pit stop several times a day to switch crews for 1-3-mile-long freights.
2 News emailed the Union Pacific media team on Aug. 25 asking if it has tried to remedy the issue, but has not received a response.
Town leadership has also gotten no word from the company.
"None," town councilor and former mayor Jerome Gnatek plainly answered when asked on Sept. 1 about communications from Union Pacific.
One town trying to solve a similar waiting game is Mannford. While it got a million-dollar federal grant for building a bridge at its railroad crossing, South Coffeyville still has to chug along.
"I approached the county commissioners and they're looking at an overpass on Route 1," Gnatek told 2 News. "But that's 5-8 years out and there's no guarantee on it. That's the only option we have...And it needs money."
"I've even written Markwayne Mullin, our senator, a letter. And I've emailed him," Chief Lamb said. "But I haven't heard anything back. Because the trains are federal, and there's nothing the state can do unfortunately."
"We're cut off," Talbott said. "We're cut off from everything."
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