Lettie Saves the Rails

From their early crusades against pollution, environmentalists have rapidly expanded the scope of their activities to tackle such issues as land use and energy policy. Now the courts have gone a step further by including declining rail service on the list of environmental concerns. Federal District Judge Marvin E. Frankel has ruled that the Interstate Commerce Commission cannot allow abandonment of any railroad service without showing that such an action does not "significantly affect the quality of the human environment."

The judge's decision is largely the result of a one-woman campaign launched by Lettie Gay Carson, a onetime newspaper reporter who has ridden the Harlem Valley line of the Penn

Central since 1925. She began battling years ago as the once fine parlor and Pullman car service between New York City and her house near Millerton, N.Y., declined. Last year she doubled her efforts, after passenger service was stopped short of Millerton. When the Penn Central tried to end freight traffic on a 30 1/2-mile stretch north from Millerton to Ghent, she sued.

As president of a coalition of farmers, businessmen and passengers, Mrs. Carson enlisted legal aid from the New York-based Natural Resources Defense Council. Lawyers William Hoppen and Thomas Creel argued that removing the train service would increase air pollution by forcing a shift to truck traffic and also have other results that should be considered as "environmental damage." Among them:

grain-price increases that would raise the cost of the region's dairy goods and disruption of transport patterns that could bankrupt a number of businesses.

Hoppen also showed that trucks use up to five times as much energy as trains to haul the same load.

Those arguments impressed the judge, who agreed that the curtailment or alteration of railroad routes--like the changing of the path of a river--should conform to the provisions of the National Environmental Policy Act. The decision could affect the current trend of wholesale abandonments of rail service; U.S. railroads have already submitted plans to stop service on more than 250 stretches of track in 40 states, with 100 more cutbacks contemplated.

"The ICC behaves like a Civil War surgeon," says Mrs. Carson. "It tries to cure every ailment by amputation." If the new ruling is upheld in higher courts, the ICC may well have to try other remedies--ranging from huge federal subsidies to outright nationalization --to cure the nation's ailing railroads.

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