“I’ve been screaming from the rooftops for a long time,” he said, “and it took that article to get people’s attention.” While McDermott declined to provide details about the 15-minute Thursday call, he said he hopes to have good news over the next month or two. “I don’t want to divulge too much about what we talked about, but if it works out the way I hope it does, it will be spectacular,” the mayor said.Ī company spokesperson previously attributed the blocked crossings problem to the city’s location near the busy train hub of Chicago and to the fact that it sits between two major rail intersections that must remain open moving a train forward or backward to clear Hammond streets would cut off the paths for other trains, which could belong to other companies.
But the day after the story was published, he got a call from Shaw, who told him he was shocked by the situation in Hammond and wanted to help fix it. “To them, I am nobody,” Mayor Thomas McDermott Jr. Officials in the working-class commuter city of Hammond previously told ProPublica that Norfolk Southern had not been helpful in the years the company’s trains blocked its intersections.
Hundreds of readers reached out to ProPublica about their own experiences with blocked crossings, caused by trains from various companies.įact-based, independent journalism is needed now more than ever. The piece featured videos and photos of children climbing over and crawling under trains operated by Norfolk Southern the images were rebroadcast by news outlets across America and beyond. The investigation, a partnership between ProPublica and InvestigateTV, detailed the challenges communities face when they are besieged by trains that can block railroad crossings for hours or even days. Department of Transportation pleading for change and Norfolk Southern’s CEO, Alan Shaw, got involved. Within 48 hours of an investigation about children having to crawl under parked trains to get to school in an Indiana suburb, residents packed a public meeting to demand solutions, the Federal Railroad Administration issued a safety advisory, a bipartisan group of Indiana lawmakers sent a letter to the U.S. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power.
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