Letter To The Editor: A Stop-Whistles Tour

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

The editorial in the Dec. 7 Foxboro Reporter advised our County Street, Spring Street, and Belcher Court residents, who regard their neighborhood as an extension of the Mansfield Freight Yard and must endure the multiple day and night runs of the CSX Freight Line, to suck it up and take it on the chin for the overall benefit of the community. After all, by putting up with a little inconvenience and change the suffering of a few can help to make things better for all.

Citizens coping with the inconveniences discussed in the editorial were at least able to anticipate and deal with a bit of afternoon traffic when the day ended at the old Foxboro Company. We realize that shopping plaza construction eventually ends and peace returns. And even after completing the Gillette Stadium project, we knew that there were eight football games and a handful of other main events to deal with. So aside from the headaches of a dozen large scale stadium events, these examples seem trivial compared to the travails of facing the calamity of a freight train rumbling through your back yard nearly seven days a week during the dead of night. Listen to the survivors describing the ferocious intensity of a tornado. They say it sounds like the roar of a freight train. When addressing the unhealthy decibel levels and their seismic scale of disturbance, these harmful problems are impossible to exaggerate. (Studies relating the negative influence of freight train noise on humans are numerous: fra.dot.gov, ncbi.nim.nih.gov). To shrug off our accounts as “anecdotal” is insulting. Where there is a freight train there is bedlam, danger, pollution, safety and traffic problems. Consult the police records for the number of neighborhood complaints filed for recent train disorder. On a ruined Thanksgiving morning we lay awake cringing to the blast furnace thundering of a locomotive idling just outside of our windows at 4:30 a.m. and ending mercifully at 5:50 a.m. This endless idling as well as the growing number of rail cars in tow happens weekly and has increased in the last six months. These matters are thrust upon us daily with no choice or warning, they are not anecdotal, they are fact. And the nightmare never ends. (We have video footage to prove our points.)

We presume that Gillette Stadium helps the town and that the project was worth the noted inconveniences. However, some might debate this point. Tax rates for towns like Weston, Wellesley, Needham, or Newton fall below the Foxboro rate of $15.19/$1,000 of assessed value. And though property assessments are generally higher in those towns they also offer more in services to their residents than Foxboro does. In what way does the freight line improve our town and what exactly is this “economic benefit” that our “Foxvale” residents must sacrifice their well being for? Is this freight train a source of pride and something to admire? Does the train generate income for the town? Perhaps the opposite is true. CSX pays nothing to run the freight using a line purchased by the state in such poor condition that it requires millions more to repair. And Foxboro never cared to construct the proper infrastructure to accommodate 200 ton locomotives and their accompanying disruptions outside of allowing this dilapidated railroad track to run through the center of town. This train is a disgrace, not an honor, to the town calling itself, “The Gem Of Norfolk County.” And who does profit from this debacle? MassDOT? CSX?

Our neighborhood has stoically suffered this abomination to its quality of life, health, and well being for decades. This recent Gillette commuter project has raised greater awareness to our plight. Are we supposed to feel secure when the state has paid 22 million dollars and has added millions more to fix this crumbling track, with no mention of noise abatement, barriers, alleviating backed up traffic, or public safety, to think that there is no grand scheme in the works? And to those who argue that increased freight traffic, and later, commuter rail, will never happen, well, there is a bridge in Brooklyn we would like to sell to you.

No, we here in Foxvale have taken it on the chin, been battered and bruised and black-eyed for decades, and for whose sake is the pain of our sacrifice and inconvenience? Not Foxboro’s. So fan the towel, splash the water, and slap our faces. We continue to fight.

Donald DiMauro

Todd Hassett