Ohio Police Agency Gets FRA Safety Grant

A project in Middletown, Ohio, is among those that will share in grant funding from the Federal Railroad Administration to promote railroad safety.

The Middletown Police Department will receive $120,000 to seek to reduce trespassing at high trespass hot spots, including several locations of homeless encampments along railroad right of ways that contribute to the trespassing risk.

A team of two officers will patrol hot spot areas through four-hour patrols working in cooperation with the CSX Police Department.

The FRA said this week it will award nearly $2 million in Railroad Trespassing Enforcement Grants and $207,000 in Railroad Trespassing Suicide grants.

The funding will be used for what the FRA described in a news release as law enforcement trespass prevention activities and educational outreach campaigns aimed at reducing railroad-related suicides on rail rights-of-way.

The grants are one component of a larger FRA program called National Strategy to Reduce Trespassing and are being awarded to programs located in areas with a high occurrence of railroad trespassing incidents.

The FRA said 25 projects in 13 states are receiving funding. Some grants also were awarded to programs in Michigan and Pennsylvania.

This includes $114,348 awarded to the Dearborn, Michigan, police department, which plans to deploy over the next year a team of two officers on four-hour blocks of overtime three times per week.

The department said in its grant application that it has responded to more than 1,700 railroad-related incidents since 2016.

In Pennsylvania, the Lower Makefield Township Police Department will receive $40,000 to provide 12 hours of police patrol activities each week for a year. The officers will monitor rail lines and the adjacent property in designated hot spots.

The LMTPD has responded to five rail-related suicides in the past five years involving trains of the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority and CSX.

Tags: Federal Railroad Administration, railroad safety, railroad trespassing, Railroad Trespassing Enforcement Grants, Railroad Trespassing Suicide grants