A resident who Action News Jax spoke with says this happens on a daily basis in this area.
He even says on some days first responders have had to turn around because of the delays.
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There was a rail yard just on the (then) western outskirts of Riverbank City of Action, and the tracks on the southern end were always jammed up with trains. Well, not always, only when I needed to cross them.
You'd be sitting there with a train at a dead stop blocking the crossing for 10 minutes and just about the time you're thinking about flipping a U-turn and driving 5 miles out of your way around the northern end of the yard, the train would start to move. You breathe a 'finally' sigh of relief.
The train backs up 50 feet and stops. Fuck. It pulls forward. Yay! It stops after 60 feet. Fuck. It backs up. Yay again. It stops. Fuck. After another 3-4 minutes of that bullshit, you do a U-turn, drive up 5 miles, cross the tracks and double back down. Twelve minutes later, as you drive past the crossing you were originally waiting at, you look over and see that damned train still hasn't moved.
It was so bad that the ammo plant quit giving employees a pass for being late because of that crossing. They told the folks that lived in Modesto "You know that route is fucked up. Either leave earlier, much earlier, or take the long way."
