Plymouth rail line hadn’t been used in decades. Now it’s back, and dangerous.
An 11-mile railway in southeastern Wisconsin plows through forests and farmland, past parks and public schools, connecting Plymouth to Kohler.
For nearly 30 years, no trains ran on the line. In some cases, towns had even ripped the rails from the roads. A whole generation grew up in Plymouth and learned to drive without a passing thought about trains on that line.
That changed in 2015. State and local governments, and local businesses, cobbled together more than $20 million to reopen the corridor. That November, trains again chugged along the route, carrying plastic products, including toilet seats, to market.
But the effort to reopen the line included minimal safety considerations and none of the six crossings in Plymouth have lights and gates, despite federal guidelines saying those crossings should have such safety equipment.
In the four years since trains returned, Plymouth has had several drivers narrowly escape being hit. One night in October 2018, a car crashed into a train stopped at the Willow Road crossing that the driver couldn’t see. Then last spring, a Wisconsin and Southern Railroad train hit and severely injured an 81-year-old man driving across the tracks.
Such incidents have raised public concern about the crossings in Plymouth. Several members of the community have complained about the lack of safety devices at the crossings, and people who live near them are continually concerned. The city formally petitioned the state last year to add additional safety measures at the six crossings. So far, the state has committed to upgrading one crossing on the line — in 2023.
Safety problems along the rail line have left some Plymouth officials wondering if reopening the crossings has been worth the trouble, and questioning if they were misled about the project.
“I would have probably voted no on it unless (safety) was clearly put in there,” Plymouth Alderman Charles Hansen said recently. “I was under the assumption myself that there would be safety. I do believe there should be bars and lights, flashing lights, at all the crossings.”
‘The train had almost hit me’
The sun had just set on a crisp fall day in 2018, leaving a dark coat of paint across the Wisconsin sky. It was clear, but 39-degree weather meant Gabi Mella was driving with her windows up.
Gabi, then 17, drove north along Highland Avenue. The radio in her green Kia Soul was low, set to the nearest country music station. Quiet subdivisions passed in her passenger side window. She saw no other cars on the street, no one on the sidewalk.
She passed a yield sign set on a wooden post just ahead of a pair of railroad tracks. Gabi didn’t slow down as she approached the rails, a potentially deadly mistake that’s become routine for drivers in Plymouth after nearly three decades of trains not running on that line.
As she felt the rumble of the tracks beneath her tires — thub thub — shake the car, she saw something. A bright light on the tracks, just to her left: the headlights of a freight train.
Panicking, Gabi mashed the gas pedal and cleared the tracks just as the train rumbled by, heading for Kohler. Heart racing, and breath short, Gabi called her mother.
“The train had almost hit me and I couldn’t even hear it,” Gabi recalled telling her mom.
Trying to save rail lines
In the 1970s, as business was drying up on smaller rail lines, Wisconsin governments and businesses started investing in lines that were at risk of being disused. The Wisconsin DOT has spent $280 million since 1980 to preserve around 625 miles of rail in the state, according to the department.
“(Legislators) thought if they lost rail service, they’d be at a competitive disadvantage,” said Mark Morrison, who recently retired from the Wisconsin DOT after working there for 30 years.
More than $20 million in public funds was spent to save the rail line from Plymouth to Kohler. But money wasn’t spent on safety devices such as flashing lights and automatic gates, even though multiple federal guidelines say the Plymouth crossings should have that equipment.
Last summer, the Federal Highway Administration released the latest version of its Railroad-Highway Grade Crossing Handbook, which gives federal guidance on everything having to do with railroad crossings. The handbook says all new railroad crossings should be protected by flashing lights and automatic gates, which would seem to include the Plymouth crossings, especially the ones where rails had to be put back in the road.
But the state doesn’t consider these crossings new, since they were never formally abandoned by a railroad, said Heather Graves, public policy analyst at the Wisconsin Office of the Commissioner of Railroads. For most everyone in Plymouth, however, the crossings were new, because trains hadn’t run on the tracks for so long.
The federal guidelines also say that crossings used by nearly 2,000 cars per day, which includes both the Highland Avenue and Pleasant View Road crossings in Plymouth, should have that equipment.
But in Plymouth, the six crossings reestablished as part of the line to Kohler only have yield signs and crossbucks, the X-shaped white signs that say “railroad crossing.”
Doug Wood, a railroad consultant who previously worked at the Wisconsin railroad commission for nearly 30 years, said the state does not prioritize crossing safety when it’s going through the rail preservation process.
“I always felt like the DOT could have said, ‘We’re going to put some safety devices here,’” Wood said. “They didn’t have to be so passive about it.”
Wood, who Plymouth hired for its petition for upgraded safety devices at its crossings, said the money raised for preservation projects should be used for safety equipment up front, rather than opening the line and worrying about protecting drivers later.
Before the line reopened in Plymouth, state rail regulators did conduct a safety analysis of the crossings on the line, but those surveys appeared to be mostly cursory. It’s also unclear if the state even used correct data.
For example, the analysis of the crossing on Pleasant View Road done on June 27, 2019, said that only 150 cars use that crossing on a daily basis. However, a traffic study done in May 2019 by Sheboygan County found that more than 2,800 cars cross over the tracks each day.
Graves downplayed the incorrect information, saying the rail commission did have the correct traffic information in its system. However, she was unable to explain why the data was incorrect on the state’s own report.
Once the regulators determined that yield signs were adequate at the six crossings in Plymouth, Brian Yerges thought little else of it. Yerges, Plymouth’s city administrator until this May, said he felt compelled to defer to the expertise of the rail officials and the DOT.
Yerges doesn’t remember local officials discussing the crossing safety during the preservation process. He now says maybe they were too focused on the “50,000-foot view” of the project, rather than considerations at the individual crossings.
“Maybe we would’ve asked more specific questions about the crossings had we known that they were going to be built and put into place and just going to be yield signs put in place,” Yerges said. “I don’t think we quite anticipated that was going to happen.”
A near death after train hits car
Roger Abraham lives on Songbird Court, on the bucolic east side of Plymouth. Through his back door, he looks right out on the railroad crossing on Pleasant View Road. Every day he can see people zipping across the tracks without slowing. Several times, he’s seen cars narrowly miss being hit by a train.
Abraham was home on the evening of April 23, 2019. Just outside his back door, Gerhard Muecke was driving south toward the tracks. The road ascends slightly just before the crossing.
To his right stood a residential fence on a slight hill, obstructing his view of the railroad tracks. To his left, several trees did the same.
On the other side of the trees, unknown to Muecke, a three-car Wisconsin and Southern Railroad freight train was heading west. Just before 5 p.m., the 81-year-old crossed the tracks without slowing and was hit in his driverside door at 21 mph, federal records of the accident show.
First responders cut Muecke out of his vehicle with the Jaws of Life and airlifted him to a hospital in Neenah. Muecke suffered serious injuries, but he escaped with his life.
Muecke did not respond to several attempts to contact him for this story.
Muecke’s accident made clear the city of Plymouth had a problem on its hands. Drivers were not prepared to deal with trains rolling through town and officials, it seemed, had not done enough to protect them.
So Plymouth hired Wood in the spring of 2019 and the former state railroad regulator started reviewing the crossings.
He concluded that five of the six crossings had inadequate safety devices. He recommended that three of the crossings in Plymouth needed flashing lights and automatic gates to protect drivers: Highland Avenue, Pleasant View Road and South Street. At two of the other crossings, Clifford Street and Willow Road, Wood recommended stop signs in place of yield signs, with a flashing stop sign at Willow Road.
At just a single crossing, Suhrke Road, did Wood agree with the state’s safety analysis that yield signs were enough to prevent accidents.
After Plymouth submitted the petition for upgrade safety devices at five of the six crossings, the state railroad commission sent Carol Brockman, a rail safety analyst, out last summer to take another look at the crossings.
In her report, Brockman determined all six crossings had inadequate safety devices and she recommended that five of them should have flashing lights and automatic gates.
Then on Dec. 11, 2019, the railroad commission unexpectedly rescinded those recommendations. Graves, the railroad commission’s public policy analyst, said the recommendations for more safety equipment had been made in error, based on incorrect train speed information. Yet, the train speeds on both the initial report and the revised report are the same, making it unclear as to why the safety recommendations were withdrawn.
In an interview earlier this year, Graves said Brockman mistakenly thought the Plymouth crossings were part of another project to increase train speeds from 25 mph to 40 mph, which is why she recommended additional safety devices.
The only tangible result Plymouth has gotten from its petition so far is that the rail commission has approved funding for flashing lights and automatic gates at the South Street crossing – though neither the accident that resulted in Muecke getting airlifted to the hospital or Gabi Mella’s near miss happened at that location.
What’s more, the commission-approved gates and lights won’t be funded until 2023.
Plymouth has now had to take the safety of the other five crossings into its own hands. At a Jan. 28 meeting, the city council unanimously approved spending $3,329.80 on a flashing stop sign at the Willow Road crossing.
Hansen, the alderman, said at the meeting that this should only be the beginning of what the city does to protect drivers at railroad crossings in town.
Yerges, the former city administrator, said he’s holding out hope Plymouth can resolve the safety problems at the crossings, but admitted that, as of now, the $20 million preservation program that brought trains back to Plymouth has not been worth it because of the safety concerns.
“If the end result is just what it is today, I would say no,” Yerges said about the preservation project. “But what happens in the next 20 years, if economic development happens and it means jobs to the community, we’re able to resolve these safety issues by getting the lights and gates in, I think it’ll be a win.”