Environmentalists have long protested the trains.
BERGENFIELD -- Environmentalists have long tried to stop trains carrying crude oil from passing through Bergen County, fearing what could happen if they crash.
But in the past few months, another force has slowed down oil train traffic in the county: the market.
A drop in oil prices has cut the number of oil trains traveling through densely populated Bergen County to as little as five a week, officials from CSX, the company that operates the trains in Bergen, said. That's down from as many as 30 a week in 2014.
"Crude oil really has dropped off for CSX and the other railroads, and a lot of that has to do with market forces," Maurice O'Connell, a vice president for the company, said in Bergenfield Monday.
Residents along the CSX-owned River Line, which runs through several Bergen County towns en route to Philadelphia, may not have noticed the dropoff, since oil trains make up only about 2 percent of CSX traffic, Rob Doolittle, a spokesman for the company, said.
CSX ships the crude oil from the Bakken fields of North Dakota to refineries in the New Jersey and Philadelphia area and to the Virgina coast, Doolittle said.
Shipments from the fields boomed in in 2013 and 2014, raising concerns about what would happen if the trains carrying the volatile Bakken oil crashed. Those fears came to a head in 2013, when a train carrying Bakken oil crashed in Lac-Megantic, Quebec, causing an explosion killed 47 people.
Doolitle said CSX has worked with local officials and emergency responders to make sure they are prepared in case of an accident.
"Rail is probably the safest way to move products like this in the first place, but we have worked hard to make it even safer," he said.
The amount of crude oil shipped by rail peaked in October 2014, when more than 13.8 million barrels were shipped from the Midwest to the East Coast. That number has since dropped sharply along with oil prices, to 4.4 million barrels in April, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, a low not reached since 2013.
Traffic has slowed to a crawl at the Enbridge Energy Partners' crude rail terminal in Philiadelphia, Reuters reported. The terminal has the capacity to process 90,000 barrels a day.
Rail executives have said the decline may be permanent because cheaper pipelines have reached North Dakota and other shale regions, the Wall Street Journal reported. Regulations after the crashes in Quebec and other areas have also made rail shipping more costly.
Paula Rogovin, a co-founder of the Coalition to Ban Unsafe Oil Trains, said she has not noticed a dropoff. One of the problems opponents of the oil trains have is that the state doesn't reveal to local officials how many trains come into the state, or when.
"It would take some of us standing by the tracks," she said.
Even then, they can only look for a hazardous materials logo on the cars, and can't tell whether Bakken crude is inside.
Mayor Norman Schmelz attended a safety meeting with CSX and Federal Railroad Administration officials in Bergenfield on Monday. He said a reduction in oil train traffic wouldn't soothe residents' fears of a crash.
"We used to see 10 a day and I think that number has significantly dropped, which is good," he said. "But it only takes one, unfortunately."
Myles Ma may be reached at mma@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @MylesMaNJ. Find NJ.com on Facebook.