An Open Letter to CSX-T

Dear Sirs:

     This evening after dinner I laid down for a nap.  I do not sleep well at night.  I do not sleep well, because my sleeping room is on the second floor of our house.  Its windows and walls face your Milan Switching Yard near downtown Fayetteville, North Carolina.  
I do not sleep well, just as my father did not sleep well, when he tried to sleep in this room.  Now I know why.  In the later stages of his ensuing dementia, he began to arise from sleep promptly at three o'clock a.m.  He was attempting to escape this room.  He complained about the bed, but it was a brand new double mattress and box springs from the Original Mattress Factory.  There is nothing wrong with the bed, other than most times it is filled with aberrant vibration from diesel/electric locomotives on your mainline in in your Milan Yard.  Fully I understand the railroads have been deregulated.  Even so air traffic has a curfew.  Residents of both cities and rural towns do not deserve diesel/electric rail traffic twenty-four hours a day, and yet that is what we get.  I do not know if the air traffic curfew is self-imposed or mandated by our federal government.  Do you feel it is constitutional to run diesel/electric traction twenty-four hours a day?  Do you feel it is constitutional to assemble large freight trains in your Milan Yard and elsewhere twenty-four hours a day?  Do you feel it is constitutional to leave your locomotives running, unmanaged, and sitting on your tracks?  May I remind your that while they may not be noisy to the ear, they are noisy in a far worse way.  The sound waves generated by both your diesel prime movers and your power inverters are of the low frequency variety.  They cannot be heard, but they can be felt.  This is a large loophole in the regulation of rail traffic, and it has been exploited like a ten dollar whore.  Instead of studying your pollution and trying to reduce it in the name of your consumers, people who eventually buy your freight, you employ high powered lobbyists to spin the existence of this pollution.  Even the audio industry has fallen prey to this ruse to the point of saying these low frequency sound waves require a specialty microphone to detect.  Let me assure you as a doctoral level composition major at The Ohio State University, it didn't take much to document and see this rampant pollution.  The wave lengths are so long and the air moves in such great quantity it would be impossible not to move the diaphragm in the microphone.  The air moves in such great quantity it vibrates my bed almost continuously, that is when you continuously operate diesel/electric locomotives with no break.  That has been the last weekend.  Usually I realize the weekends are worse, and I motor down to your Milan Yard to verify you are assembling a large freight train.  I relish the hour when this switching is complete, and this large vibrating menace departs your Milan Yard.  Usually my nerves, close to the breaking point, recover.  The effects of these large sound waves are unusual.  Instead of behaving like normal frequency audible sound, they behave more like barometric pressure or gravity waves.  This evening I was plagued with sleep paralysis.  I am so tired that I am enjoying my body's inability to move.  I am at rest.  Then I begin to dream in response the sensations I feel on my skin.  It is vibration from your power inverters.  It is of such high pressure it prevents me from moving.  I struggle to wake up, escape the dream, and move.  I cannot do any of these things.  I get used to it.  I engage in the dream, in the fight to rise, and become incensed that my sleep, something which determines my mental stability, is being raped at such a conscious level.  Each morning I am jolted awake at six o'clock a.m.  The pressure in the air from aircraft flying directly over our house, from huge freight trains passing through downtown, and from normal road traffic is so great I feel like I am going to have a stroke or a heart attack and die.  It is the worst feeling of ill health I ever have experienced.  Truly death could not be worse.  Do I invent these sensations?  Would the CSX-T employee with whom I engaged in conversation fifteen years ago in an engineers chat room on the web continue to say I am delusional?  Ask Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris if they enjoyed the two underground conveyor belts built by General Electric in the Molybdenum mines near Littleton, Colorado.  The technology of a diesel prime mover powering a generator which produces direct current that is rectified to alternating current whose frequency then is modified with a computer and inverted for use in low frequency drives is the same  on your trains.  It is equally as disruptive.  Any company with a conscience would be aware of their refuse and attempt to manage it, or you could do what Duke Power does.  

       Sincerely, 

      The consumers of freight of which we cannot do without if the railroads stopped earning revenue.