Letter To The Editor: Noise, Traffic Among New MBTA Line Concerns

The following is a letter to the editor. If you have a letter you would like to see published, you can email Foxborough Patch Local Editor Dan Libon at Dan.Libon@patch.com.

Dear Editor,

Freight trains are difficult to ignore as they rumble through the “Gem of Norfolk County”, thundering past backyards and cutting a path straight through the center of Foxborough blasting their whistles at every intersection. Their presence rivals nature, they are a natural force like a tornado or an earthquake. The power of their horns and engines can wake the dead and rattle our windows, and the long line of rail cars stretch so far out of sight that they barricade our intersections and impact the safety of our roads.

Recently, The Mass Department of Transportation purchased the Framingham Secondary Line. They paid twenty-two million dollars for the twenty-two miles of rail that runs from Mansfield to Framingham. A short leg of this track will merge with the Fairmount Line at Gillette Stadium to create train service to and from South Station. This proposal plans to run a pilot program beginning in the Spring of 2019 which Town Officials have already approved.

Under the state’s new Freight Plan, MassDOT continues to work on the Framingham Secondary Line, spending millions more replacing railroad ties and adding ballast to reinforce the tracks. As a result, freight service is expected to increase using this line.

The main focus of the commuter rail plan is to service Gillette Stadium. The track that links Gillette to the Fairmount line actually begins in Mansfield and, outside of the special train that delivers fans to the Stadium on game day, commuter service from Mansfield to Gillette is not yet included in the plan. However, it is not difficult to imagine the day when a commuter line, sharing the track with freight, will run from Mansfield to Gillette to complete the rail package.

I can testify that after living in this neighborhood for close to thirty years that the lives of humans are not meant to coexist with freight trains. The word “noise” cannot even come close to describing the mayhem we’ve put up with over the years here on County Street. We have endured convoys of eighteen wheeled trucks hauling crushed stone down our road to the Mansfield train yard. Lying in our beds during the dead of night and those early morning hours we do not sleep through the din of idling locomotives whose engines grumble and snort like a blast furnace right under our windows. And whistles may blow at any hour but they seem to prefer the quiet times of 1 a.m. and 4 a.m. to blast their horns and to create the most gut-wrenching racket of squealing and screeching and metal on metal scraping and high-pressure hissing and all of this done with blatant disregard and disrespect toward the neighborhood where they are working.

Do we choose to reside in a train yard or a neighborhood?

Improved rail service is way more complicated than just repairing tracks. An efficient rail system may help to ease certain kinds of environmental problems but the noise that trains generate negate those benefits. Noise is pollution. Noise scars the landscape. Noise causes health problems. Freight train noise increases the risk of heart disease, causes anxiety, high blood pressure, sleeping disorders and antisocial behavior. The noise level of a freight train is second only to the roar of a jet plane flying at 500 feet. Noise does not enhance the quality of our world. To expand a 200-year-old technology and to integrate it with 21st century life will require great effort and compromise to succeed. And these plans will fail without effective noise abatement strategies.

We now have to live with the threat of increased freight traffic and the strong possibility of commuter trains also using our neighborhoods. If these safety and quality of life issues concern you, then please join us at the Kennedy-Donovan Center, on Dec. 4, at 3:30 p.m., to attend a meeting organized by State Representative, Jay Barrows, to discuss with MassDOT Officials and Foxborough Town Leaders, the disruptive nature of increased rail traffic, the unacceptable levels of noise it generates, and what the State really wants.

Sincerely,

Donald DiMauro
Kathy DiMauro
Todd Hassett