Rail Yard

At lunchtime on May 15, 2001, CSX Locomotive No. 8888 eased down tracks in a rail yard outside Toledo, Ohio. The engine known as "Crazy Eights" picked up speed as it pulled 47 freight cars, two of them loaded with toxic chemicals, south toward Columbus. Only no one was on board. Jon Hosfeld, a native of Mechanicsburg, Pa., was in the rail yard eating his lunch. He wasn't supposed to be there that day. Hosfeld, 52, ran a CSX yard 67 miles south in Kenton; he'd come north to deposit a carload of children and Ohio's lieutenant governor in Toledo for a program aimed at raising awareness about the dangers of rail crossings.

Three federal health officials were admitted to the Paoli rail yard yesterday, ending a standoff between the federal government and SEPTA that began Wednesday when transit police barred a health evaluation team from the site. Two representatives from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) and one from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) - each clad in protective clothing and shoes - entered the site shortly before 1 p.m. to begin evaluating the risk posed to workers by the presence of polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, a suspected carcinogen found at the site.

Tredyffrin supervisors said they would ask the EPA for an extension to the May 15 deadline for public comment on the $25 million plan to clean up soil, streams and buildings surrounding the Paoli rail yard Superfund site. The site is contaminated with polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), which are believed to be linked to cancer. The EPA released plans in March to eliminate the PCBs at the site, which is owned by Amtrak and operated by SEPTA. "It just annoys me that the government is saying we're going to make a clean sweep of this," said Supervisor Herbert Greenwood.

The federal Environmental Protection Agency has proposed cleaning up the PCB-contaminated Paoli rail yard under its $8.5 billion Superfund program. The train maintenance yard, operated by SEPTA, was one of 64 toxic-waste sites - eight of them in Montgomery County and two in Chester County - that the EPA recommended Thursday for addition to the national Superfund priority list. The sites are in 24 states. Inclusion on the list would qualify the sites for some of the money earmarked by Congress last year for cleanup of the nation's worst toxic dumps over the next five years, according to EPA spokesman Ray Germann.

The Delaware River Port Authority is asking its rail and shipping consultant to take another look at whether the authority's new rail yard in South Philadelphia should be merged with an adjacent, privately run yard or whether the two should compete. The consultant, Jim Brennan of the Lexington, Mass., firm of Temple, Barker & Sloan, told the authority in the summer of 1990 that there might not be enough business to support both the multimillion-dollar DRPA yard and the private RailPort facility, which opened last summer.

An 11-year-old boy who was electrocuted Saturday while climbing on a SEPTA commuter train had apparently walked into a North Philadelphia rail yard after leaving a neighborhood block party. Jewel Angelo, of the 300 block of West Albanus Street, was found dead on the ground near two trains at the Wayne Electric facility Sunday morning. He was apparently killed Saturday evening around 7 p.m. after he climbed atop a train car and touched a rooftop pantograph, which carries 11,000 volts of electricity from overhead lines to power the train, SEPTA assistant general manager James B. Jordan said Monday.

The theft of two high-explosive mortar rounds from a container on a flatbed railway car last week in South Philadelphia is under investigation by city police and the FBI, authorities said yesterday. Police said someone broke into a Sea/Land container between 7:50 p.m. last Wednesday and 12:35 a.m. Thursday while the rail car stood unattended in a rail yard at 1100 Terminal Ave. At 2:15 a.m. Thursday, the Police Department's South Detective Division was notified by Conrail authorities that the theft had occurred, police said.

Federal health officials trying to assess the risk posed to workers by high concentrations of a toxic chemical at the Paoli rail yard were barred from the site yesterday morning by SEPTA transit police. Representatives from the Environmental Protection Agency, the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health tried to enter a gate near a repair shop at the site about 9:30 a.m. but were turned away by armed SEPTA police officers, an EPA spokesman said.

An Environmental Protection Agency official last week said he was optimistic about recent developments in the effort to clean up suspected carcinogens at the PCB-contaminated Paoli rail yard. "This should be a very welcome evening to the citizens of Paoli," William Steuteville, an EPA enforcement officer, told a handful of Paoli residents who had gathered Wednesday evening to hear an update on the controversial cleanup. Steuteville's enthusiasm stemmed from agreements the agency reached last month, after more than a year of negotiations, with the rail companies involved in litigation over the contamination.

Kathy Brown of Paoli was agitated. She pointed a finger and scowled toward various spots in her yard where, according to visiting environmental officials, high levels of toxic PCBs lurk in the soil. "I'm annoyed!" Brown cried Wednesday as she stood in the driveway of her West Central Avenue home next to the alleged source of the contamination - SEPTA's Paoli railroad maintenance yard. After all, said Brown, it was the second time that such news had been delivered to her. The first was more than two years ago. At that time, workers from the federal Environmental Protection Agency covered her yard with plastic.

URBAN RENEWAL is complicated, rife with backroom politics and big-business interests, accusations of class and racial prejudice. Planners tout lofty goals, sometimes attainable, to win project support. Meanwhile, they're displacing communities that had been intact for decades, even centuries. Here in Philadelphia, the ever- expanding reach of the University of Pennsylvania has often been at odds with its University City neighbors and even the student body. As a Penn student myself, I was active in Save Open Space (S.O.S.)

AS THE RAIN poured down and wind blew yesterday, homeless people who had set up camp in a wooded section of an old Conrail yard in Port Richmond moved their tents and belongings to a paved lot under the I-95 overpass. They were told Monday night by a cop with the Norfolk Southern Corp., which co-owns Conrail, to get out by noon yesterday or risk getting locked up. About 30 homeless people in 20 tents had been camped out in the tree-shrouded hills of the old rail yard, just north of Cumberland Street and east of Richmond, since Sunday - the deadline day by which campers were to leave the Occupy Philly site at City Hall.

CALL IT OCCUPY Philly Homeless Camp, Part II. A self-described homeless advocate has created a tent encampment on a hilly, wooded section of the old Conrail yard in Port Richmond, just east of Richmond Street and north of Cumberland, sandwiched between the Delaware River and I-95. Since Sunday - the day of the eviction that never took place - about 20 tents had been set up there as of last night, each housing one or two homeless people. "We commandeered it," said the homeless advocate, Dennis Payne, 50, of the old rail yard.

IT'S NOT unheard of for a driver to jump in the car and speed off after an accident in Philly. Yesterday morning, however, a woman who fled the scene of an accident in Wynnefield took an unconventional route trying to avoid the consequences, police said, and jumped over the City Avenue bridge. It happened after the man whose car she hit on Presidential Boulevard caught up with her, blocked her car and called police. The woman plummeted to a rail yard below, fire officials said, and the hit-and-run victim stood by, speaking with an emergency dispatcher.

At lunchtime on May 15, 2001, CSX Locomotive No. 8888 eased down tracks in a rail yard outside Toledo, Ohio. The engine known as "Crazy Eights" picked up speed as it pulled 47 freight cars, two of them loaded with toxic chemicals, south toward Columbus. Only no one was on board. Jon Hosfeld, a native of Mechanicsburg, Pa., was in the rail yard eating his lunch. He wasn't supposed to be there that day. Hosfeld, 52, ran a CSX yard 67 miles south in Kenton; he'd come north to deposit a carload of children and Ohio's lieutenant governor in Toledo for a program aimed at raising awareness about the dangers of rail crossings.

The state has granted $1 million to build a solar-power field on part of a Superfund site at the Paoli rail yard, as part of a plan for a new transportation facility, officials announced Monday. The panels will cover three acres at the west end of the rail yard, across from Central Avenue. Construction is to begin in the fall and be complete by the end of the year. Energy from the panels will feed into a substation in the yard that provides electricity for SEPTA's Paoli-Thorndale line and Amtrak.

Overnight security at SEPTA rail yards - which might have prevented an 11-year-old boy from being electrocuted Saturday - ended about 10 years ago. Wayne Junction in Germantown, where Jewels Angelo was killed when he touched an electrified mechanism atop a SEPTA train car, used to be guarded 24 hours a day, said David Waters, a former SEPTA security officer who patrolled that area in the 1990s. Patrols could have saved Angelo's life, Waters said. "If [the rail yard] had security, they would have seen the kids running down the yard," he said.

An 11-year-old boy who was electrocuted Saturday while climbing on a SEPTA commuter train had apparently walked into a North Philadelphia rail yard after leaving a neighborhood block party. Jewel Angelo of the 300 block of West Albanus Street was killed around 7 p.m. after he climbed atop a train car and touched a rooftop pantograph, which carries 11,000 volts of electricity from overhead lines to power the train, SEPTA assistant general manager James B. Jordan said Monday. Jordan said the boy and several other youths had been seen along nearby rail tracks after leaving a block party on Elwood Street.

An 11-year-old boy who was electrocuted Saturday while climbing on a SEPTA commuter train had apparently walked into a North Philadelphia rail yard after leaving a neighborhood block party. Jewel Angelo of the 300 block of West Albanus Street was killed around 7 p.m. after he climbed atop a train car and touched a rooftop pantograph, which carries 11,000 volts of electricity from overhead lines to power the train, SEPTA assistant general manager James B. Jordan said Monday. Jordan said the boy and several other youths had been seen along nearby rail tracks after leaving a block party on Elwood Street.