Families say train blocking church cemetery preventing access to loved ones

A church community in Rocky Mount says train traffic for the Carolina Connector rail terminal is blocking access to their cemetery for hours at a time.

Families say the trains are preventing them from paying their respects to loved ones, and they’re calling on CSX to address the issue.

Whenever she can, Laronda Clark makes the trip from Greensboro to Rocky Mount to visit the grave of her father, a former pastor who’s buried in a cemetery owned by Marks Chapel Baptist Church.

To get there, she has to pass over a set of railroad tracks – and that’s where her troubles begin.

“Going there, the train has blocked the entrance of going into the cemetery,” Clark said. “And I’ve gone several times to try to pay my respects to my father.”

The issue is the Carolina Connector, Rocky Mount’s flagship infrastructure project that came online in October.

The project was built next to the cemetery, and right before it opened, Clark got a notice from NCDOT saying that the only other entrance to the cemetery was being permanently closed due to the CSX hub.

That left just one road in or out, crossed by the sets of tracks that trains use to wait for their turn to access the connector.

One of those trains was blocking the road in December on the day that Clark’s father was buried.

“I missed my father’s committal, so that was very disheartening,” Clark said. “They had to do it over the telephone because the train took so long.”

Since then, it’s only gotten worse, with Clark saying she’s waited as long as five hours for the train to move and let her into the cemetery.

“Going there, it’s kind of like a part of my healing process,” Clark said. “So when I have to drive two and a half hours and then every time I would go, the train is stuck across the railroad tracks, CSX has blocked my access to my father.”

“So that makes me very unsettled,” she continued.

The church’s pastor told WRAL News that before the terminal was built, he told CSX that he was concerned about trains blocking access to the cemetery, but the company assured him that wouldn’t happen.

He’s now sent multiple emails to CSX over the past few weeks asking for help.

“It’s been an ongoing issue for us,” Marks Chapel Baptist Church senior pastor Douglas Leonard said. “They heard me, but I don’t think they were listening, because it continued.”

Leonard said the trains haven’t just prevented entry to the cemetery.

He told WRAL News that another woman in his congregation was recently inside the cemetery when the road was blocked, forcing her to have to crawl between the cars to get out.

WRAL News reached out to CSX for a response to the church community’s concerns.

“We apologize for the inconvenience that stopped trains have caused the local community,” a spokesperson for the company said in a statement. “CSX reviewed our operations in the area…going forward, if a train is blocking cemetery access for an extended period, CSX crews will break the train in order to ensure access is not impaired.”

But the next day, the church’s pastor says a train blocked one of their funeral processions for 45 minutes.

“It’s important for me, I don’t know about anyone else but it’s important to me to be able to have access to my father,” Clark said. “That’s my passion, to make sure that everyone else including myself has access.”