A bridge too far: Philadelphia and CSX collide over railroad’s request to demolish an aging bridge

As if urban life in hardscrabble Southwest Philadelphia were not tough enough, along comes one of the nation’s richest railroad companies, proposing to demolish a decaying bridge, and turn the busy street in front of your business into a permanent cul-de-sac.

So it is for Bill Janes and other inhabitants along Cemetery Avenue, where CSX Transportation wants to remove a 60-year-old city bridge carrying vehicles and pedestrians over its twin freight lines. CSXT, which is responsible for the span’s upkeep, says the Cemetery Avenue bridge is unnecessary. It asked the state to allow it to dismantle the bridge and abolish the crossing forever.

“It’s ridiculous,” said Janes, 61, who owns several properties on Cemetery Avenue including an auto-repair garage, which he fears would lose customers if the street were to become a dead end. “I’m surprised they want to shut it down. There’s so much traffic here.”

CSXT filed the request in 2019 with the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission, which has jurisdiction over the 8,785 railroad crossings in Pennsylvania, including about 640 operating public crossings in Philadelphia. The railroad’s request got little public attention and Janes only learned of CSXT’s proposal because he cornered some city officials inspecting the span a year ago. But the case has quietly generated an astonishing volume of testimony, engineering reports, and rebuttals before the PUC.

“This was a very important fight for the city,” said Darin L. Gatti, the chief engineer of the Philadelphia Streets Department. He said the city is engaged in an ongoing jurisdictional battle with railroads over maintaining their property, and sometimes loses. In this case, he felt the city had a strong case, and it decided to keep its arguments inside the legal sphere of the PUC proceeding rather than inflame the community.

“We were not about to give in lightly because the railroad doesn’t feel like maintaining it anymore,” he said.

At its core is a debate that occasionally erupts into public view when aging infrastructure fails, such as the recent bridge collapse in Pittsburgh. Who pays for the upkeep? The railroad, which has maintained a bridge at the location since 1886, when horse-drawn carriages carried traffic to nearby Mount Moriah Cemetery, says the bridge is no longer necessary in a modern world, and suggested that traffic could find alternate routes nearby. If the city derives a benefit from the structure, it says, then the city should maintain it.

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“CSXT seeks to abolish this bridge because it failed to keep up with its maintenance and now does not want to pay for its years of neglect,” Deputy City Solicitor James C. Kellett wrote last year in a brief to the PUC. The bridge is a “vital link in the local highway network” and its closure would affect emergency responders, residents, “and any person who regularly traverses the area,” Kellett wrote.

Philadelphia Police Lt. Joseph Ruff testified that the Cemetery Avenue bridge was the primary access route for 4,500 police calls in 2020, including 195 calls for “higher-grade felonies such as murder, rape, aggravated assault, and arson, among others.” Gatti testified that firetrucks, ambulances, and garbage trucks would be unable to turn around in the dead ends.

About 5,400 motorists now use the bridge every day and would need to find alternative routes. Pedestrians would need to take a half-mile detour over the nearest bridge, on 65th Street. The city recommends replacing the bridge, which it estimates would cost $5 million.

The PUC on Feb. 3 agreed with the city, whose position was largely endorsed in a recommended decision last year by Administrative Law Judge Darlene Heep. She assigned responsibility for bridge repairs to the railroad and said the city was responsible for fixing the bridge approaches, which are also in poor condition.

Neither CSXT, which is based in Jacksonville, Fla., nor its attorney in Harrisburg responded to questions about whether the railroad planned to appeal the decision. CSXT, which has 827 operating crossings in Pennsylvania, including 120 in Philadelphia, was the nation’s fourth-largest rail carrier in 2020, with $10.6 billion in revenue and $2.8 billion in profits. Its stock price has more than doubled in five years.

Railroads that crisscross Pennsylvania apply to abolish about a dozen crossings every year, said Nils Hagen-Frederiksen, the PUC’s press secretary. The requests are usually not controversial. Most rail crossings in Pennsylvania are “at-grade” crossings, where vehicles and the railway ride at the same level. But most crossings in densely developed Philadelphia are either above or below grade, involving a bridge either carrying vehicles over the railroad or a span carrying the railroad over the roadway.

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Two years ago, the PUC approved CSXT’s proposal to abolish the Pine Street bridge crossing over the same rail line in Darby borough, about 1.8 miles southwest of Cemetery Avenue. The bridge was in danger of “imminent failure,” according to a state inspector’s report, and CSXT estimated it would cost $25 million or more to replace it.

The adversaries in the Cemetery Avenue controversy cited a 2007 case where Norfolk Southern sought to abolish an at-grade railroad crossing on 11th Avenue in North Lebanon, east of Harrisburg, which had been the site of several accidents with vehicles. The PUC rejected the railroad’s application to abolish the crossing but ordered local government to install and maintain crossing gates since it was responsible for an awkward traffic configuration that had contributed to the safety issue. The Commonwealth Court upheld the PUC’s decision.

In the Philadelphia case, the city dug up historical documents showing that Cemetery Avenue predated the railway, which a CSXT predecessor company, the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, built in 1886 to extend its service from Maryland to Philadelphia. At the time, City Council approved B&O’s plan to build its line through the city, with a terminal at 24th and Chestnut Streets that was demolished in 1963. But the railroad was obliged to maintain the crossings, since they were installed at the railroad’s convenience.

The railroad has rebuilt the Cemetery Avenue bridge two times: in 1921 and more recently in 1961, after it was destroyed in a derailment. At the 1961 reconstruction, B&O recommitted itself to maintaining the structure.

The bridge on Cemetery Avenue is like many of the 500 or so railroad bridge crossings in Philadelphia -- most of the city’s 638 public rail crossings involve a bridge, rather than an “at grade” crossing. CSXT has 120 operating crossings in the city, all but 13 of which involve bridges, according to a state database. (SEPTA, with 223 crossings, has the most in Philadelphia.)

The Cemetery Avenue bridge does not draw attention to itself. It is a single-span steel-girder bridge, 88 feet long and 48.3 feet wide with a curb-to-curb width of 30 feet. There are walkways on either side. The pedestrian railings, which are not original, are constructed of wood and are open at the bottom, allowing the free passage of large objects or living things to the tracks more than 20 feet below.

Gatti, the city engineer, said he was shocked when he first visited the Cemetery Avenue bridge and saw the wooden pedestrian railing that replaced the original metal structure. The large openings posed a safety risk under any standard, he said. “It doesn’t meet any code.”

The bridge is decorated with graffiti and cluttered with litter and has never been repainted since it was built. That’s another point of contention between the city and CSXT.

CSXT says it spent more than $600,000 since 2015 to repair the bridge, including patching corrosion and perforations in the upright steel walls separating vehicles from pedestrians. It replaced floor-system components that were damaged and bent underneath by a train strike. It also repaired a portion of the concrete deck.

When the work was done, CSXT’s engineers informed the city that the bridge no longer required a 14-ton load limit, but the city still posts signs prohibiting heavy trucks. That, too, is a point of contention.

A confidential inspection report found other defects, many of which are blacked out in the public version filed with the PUC. When the commission’s order becomes final -- and that could take months or years if CSXT appeals -- the railroad will have seven days to address the highest repair priorities and six months to fix other issues.

The city has two months after CSXT’s work is done to fix the approaches to the bridge. The city said it is committed to fulfilling its responsibilities as soon as possible.