After reading the post about a lawyer suing for wrongful death because a train failed to alert his client’s automobile of its presence, dodge his client’s the automobile, or otherwise stop on a dime, I thought of a graph that would be fairly interesting to see in Trains Magazine.
I am told that railroads are doing more and more to isolate themselves from the public and minimize their exposure to the accident discussed above. One of the efforts in this endeavor is the gradual removal of railroad crossings and replacing them with an overpass, underpass, or simply removing them.
I have not seen a lot of press about the success of this project. I wonder how many rail crossings are removed from active rail lines per year?
Gabe
P.S. Obviously, when you replace the crossing with an underpass or overpass, this lowers fatalities. However, in my hometown, NS has simply removed two rail crossings in a contract with the town under the guise of “safety.” This kind of leaves me scratching my head, as one crossing with 100 cars going through it per day is just as dangerous as two crossings with 50 cars going through it per day.
Union Pacific removed over 100 crossings in Wyoming and 63 in Colorado last year…
The railroads have a long way to go in meeting FRA’s goal of 50% at-grade crossing removal. Sadlly, certain state DOT’s (like Illinois at East St. Louis) and multiple local jurisdictions are clueless to what’s been going on and seem to want to resist the entire concept of reducing risk. The remaining crossing removal effort is going to be only more difficult to accomplish.
I would think OLI or the FRA could furnish the sadistics (sad statistics) on where the program is at.
Just a thought, but it mught be a longer term outlook kind of thing. While one crossing with 100 vehicles per day should average the same accident rate as 2 crossing at 50 per day (though, I’ll make a point about that in the next paragraph), it’s also cheaper to build one grade seperation as opposed to two. So maybe there are plans for a grade seperation project in the pipe, but NS only wants to have to do one to improve safety. Just a thought.
Also, I would tend to believe that one 100-car crossing would be safer than 2 50-car crossings. Since the number of trains on the line would remain constant, I would kind of see 2 50-car crossings as twice as many opportunities for idiots to try to beat the train. Additionally, I’ve noticed that drivers who cross gates that are down usually don’t do so if there are other cars in line, but rather only when no one else is around. Since doubling the number of crossings would mean doubling the number of potential empty problems, I could see some potential benefits in cutting the number of crossings.
…Another factor may be that the “50” car crossing presently has no crossing lights as does the "100"car crossing and the RR may be trying to close the first one for a safety and an economic move…{After closing, no warning lights needed}.
You’re leaving out a player in the whole scenario, Indiana DOT (Being that that authority that used to be the Indiana PUC and the Railroad Commission before that )…That whole agreement would not happen without InDOT’s approval and only InDOT could sanction or order the arms to be added to the surviving crossing protection. (If the railroad or the highway owner did it there would be breach of contract and probable violation of the Indiana Code).
How many level crossings on Amtrak Washington / Boston ? I believe the only level crossings were in Connecticut which has quite a few. Are these Connecticut ones gradually being removed?