Rail
Safety Group Hopes To Turn Tragedies Into Change
Plain
Dealer
Sunday,
November 21, 1999
by: Angela Townsend-Plain
Dealer Reporter
NORTH CANTON - Kelly
Waldron's father listened intently while a Cleveland lawyer
rattled off strategies on preparing for a wongful-death court
case.
Taneeca Klostermeier's
mother, wearing a button decorated with her daughter's smiling
face, showed people pictures of the permanent memorial for
the girl.
Eric Ivie's best
friend from high school and Ryan Moore's mother sat at one
of the front tables, reminiscing about their dead loved ones.
Until yesterday,
these former strangers shared only tragedy: Each had lost
a friend or family member in a collision between train and
car, usually at road-rail intersections without warning lights
or safety gates.
The sad trait they
sared brough them, and more than two dozen others like them
from Ohio and six other states, together for the first time
yesterday. In a small meeting room at the Belden Village
Holiday Inn, they gave birth to the National Rail Safety
Coalition, a grass-roots group they dedicated to fight for
safer railroad crossings nationwide.
Vicky Moore of Stark
County and Scott Gauvin of Springfield, Ill., were the catalysts.
Moore and her husband, Dennis, have crusaded against unguarded
rail crossings since 1995, when they lost their son, Ryan,
in a car-train collision that killed two others and seriously
injured three, including Ryan's older brother Jason.
"I think it's
frustration that brought us all together," Vicky Moore
said. "What's driving us is loosing our children and
our loved ones at these crossings. We know other people don't
understand what it's like until you've been there."
The fledgling organization
wants to pressure railroads and governments to do away with
unguarded rail crossings and demand more accountability from
railroads for collisions and other accidents, founders say.
They also want to push for more public education on rail-safety
issues and serve as a source of support for others who have
recently lost loved ones in car-train collisions.
"I hope there's
some day where we don't need to be together anymore," said
Scott Gauvin, founder of the Springfield, Ill.- based Coalition
for Safer Crossings.
Gauvin and the others
hope to draw 500 participants to the National Rail Safety
Coalition's first national conference in Washington, D.C.,
next fall.
Several participants
in yesterday's planning meeting belong to other rail-safety
groups. The Moores created a lobbying and education foundation
called Angels on Track with $5.4 million that a jury ordered
Conrail to pay after Ryan's death. Gauvin, 23, formed his
advocacy group after his best friend Eric Ivie's death three
years ago last week.
Vicky Moore and
Gauvin hatched the idea to pull the smaller groups into one
national umbrella organization during a three-hour telephone
conversation in September, when Gauvin tracked down Moore
after seeing her interviewed on CNN.
They commiserated
about the frustration of dealing with so many levels of bureaucracy
and their impatience toward what they say is the snail's
pace of change. They vowed that together they would fight
to speed it up and to recruit others to their cause.
Among the allied
joining them yesterday were Larry Waldron, who drove with
his wife from Virginia to attend the planning session; Debbie
Klostermeier of Liberty Center, a Toledo suburb; and Sherry
Fox, executive director of RailWatch, a nonprofit railroad-safety
organization based in Houston.
"We need to
push these issues into the national discussion," said
Fox, who cited a study that found that 80 percent of the
nation's road-rail crossings are unguarded. "The fact
that we're getting together is already an accomplishment," Fox
said.
Fourteen people
in Ohio were killed in train-car collisions in 1998, down
from 63 in 1989, according to the Public Utilities Commission
of Ohio. Over that decade, more than 2,000 train-car collisions
occurred in the state, according to PUCO.
Despite
the decline in deaths, the fact that people still continue
to die is cause for concern, Gauvin said. He pointed to
last February's collision of an Amtrak train with a truck
in Bourbonnais, Ill., which killed 11 people. Rail safety
became a public issue, Gauvin said, but "after a few
months the issue died."
"Some
state and federal legislation, including on Ohio bill to
fund railroad-safety education for schoolchildren from
kindergarten through grade 12, is pending and gives hope,
coalition members aid.
But it's too late
for Vicky Moore, who on Thursday visited her son's grave.
Had fate been kinder, it would have been his 21st birthday.
He'd
sit back and have this grin on his face," Moore said, imagining Ryan's
reaction to this weekend's meeting. "There she goes
again."
"There's
something making me do this besides myself."
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