When a fire raged through a Central Baltimore industrial building last month, Michele Baskin tried to help her neighbors escape to safety.

Emergency vehicles blocked off 24th Street and multiple fire hoses snaked along 23rd Street for blocks out to Howard Street, making the only two ways out of lower Remington impassable unless residents walked, which wasn’t possible for some older and mobility-challenged neighbors.

There used to be a third way out — a small bridge on Sisson Street over the railroad cut — but it was closed to traffic nearly four years ago, and torn down over the summer. Before the fire, its absence was an inconvenience, just another cause of frustration with the city’s transportation department and the freight railroad, CSX Transportation, who were locked in a decades-old debate over just who is responsible for maintaining certain infrastructure in the area around the tracks.

Now neighbors say it feels like a public safety liability.

Baskin showed paramedics where to bring stretchers to carry some residents out to an area beyond the blockade and get them into a car. Others never left their homes, watching black smoke billow into the air outside their windows.

In the weeks since, Baskin said, residents keep discussing the absence of the Sisson Street Bridge.

Officials from both CSX and the Baltimore City Department of Transportation said they are currently negotiating the terms of rebuilding the bridge.

But that’s what the city has told the neighborhood for two years, Baskin said, and media reports suggest that’s been the case since at least 2009.

Once the negotiations end, it will be at least another two years until a new bridge opens.

“The residents just feel forgotten,” Baskin said.

In a late November letter, Greater Remington Improvement Association board members, including Baskin, told the city’s transportation department head, Veronica McBeth, that the missing bridge made firefighters’ work more difficult and put residents in danger.

“Although no one was hurt in this incident, our community remains deeply concerned about future risks in this area,” the letter reads.

An old set of rules

The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad first laid down what it called the Beltline in the early 1890s. It built the Howard Street Tunnel under the city and ran the tracks from its Camden Yards rail yard to the Jones Falls valley, then east in a trench through Central Baltimore to meet with its new line from Philadelphia.

CSX came to own the line through a series of mergers during the railroad consolidation of the late 20th century. By a more than 150-year-old precedent, national railroads enjoy incredible power to acquire land for their use through eminent domain.

Land records going back to when the tracks were laid can be unclear.

As a result, Baltimore City and CSX have been arguing about ownership and responsibility for bridges, roads, retaining walls and other infrastructure with each other for decades.

Residents can point out what appear to be physical examples of this throughout Remington: a sidewalk on Huntingdon Avenue in otherwise good condition save for a dilapidated section where the road travels over the tracks; rusted, broken fencing along the tracks; bulk trash dumped near railroad crossings that festers for weeks.

“Anything that’s a micro-level issue, it’s hard to engage CSX,” said Jamie Kendrick, a former planner with the city’s transportation department. “But that’s not unique to Baltimore.”

The two sides reportedly reached an agreement about the rebuild of a handful of bridges in 2007, according to a 2009 Baltimore Sun story, that would have CSX pay for 75% of the reconstruction but pass ownership to the city. Kendrick told The Sun at the time that it took “a thousand details and lots of lawyers.”

He also told The Sun that the two sides were negotiating over the Sisson Street Bridge.

It appears the two sides are close to an agreement 16 years later.

Transportation department spokesperson Kathy Dominick said in an email that CSX will pay for 25% of the new bridge’s cost and Baltimore will be responsible for the rest. Federal funds will help offset the city cost share, she said.

The bridge construction has not yet been put out to bid, so the city doesn’t have a total cost yet, she said.

CSX spokesperson Austin Staton described the rebuild as a city project.

Both sides acknowledged that the agreement is still under review.

The city closed the bridge to traffic in early 2022 after an inspection revealed the structure, built in 1950, was unsound.

Fences went up on either side, but that didn’t stop people from sneaking through to cross it on foot or pitch tents underneath, neighbors said. Worse, it became popular with scofflaws turned away from the nearby Sisson Street waste station looking for a place to unload old couches and other bulk trash.

CSX and the city worked together to tear it down this past summer while the railroad shut down train traffic to finish renovating the Howard Street Tunnel. The larger construction project included rebuilding multiple bridges along the rail line to increase their height clearance, but at Sisson Street, CSX determined it could lower the tracks and didn’t need to include a new bridge in that construction package.

The city’s process for designing the bridge replacement goes back to at least 2014, so long ago that some residents think the final design no longer meets the neighborhood’s needs.

There was a proposal to redevelop an area including some old buildings and a Maryland Transit Administration overflow lot into a site for a Walmart and Home Depot, meaning the future bridge would need to accommodate tractor trailers. With those plans now scrapped, residents like Baskin would rather the city build something smaller, saving money and focusing on making it pedestrian-friendly.

“We want to make sure we are putting in something that actually serves residents again,” Baskin said.