This was brought up by Greyhounds in another thread, but I am starting a new thread dedicated to the topic, since other thread is only indirectly related to this topic.
This relates to the two different types of grade crossings named Active and Passive. Active crossings have flashing lights, bells, and often have automatic gates. Passive crossing have only a crossbuck and an advance warning sign of a railroad crossing. They also often have a stop sign, or yield sign.
Passive protection is used for crossings in rural areas because funding is limited for active crossing protection. And rural crossings have less road traffic so can get by with a lower level of protection. Still, the limited protection of rural crossing tends to raise their danger compared to active crossing in any given train/vehicle encounter.
But the cost of active crossing protection is very high, and funding is short for changing passive crossings into active crossings. So there is an interest in developing a new type of active crossing protection that is on par with the safety provided by today’s active crossings, but to do that at a substantially reduced cost, so it becomes affordable to convert today’s passive crossings into active crossings. This is what Greyhounds has proposed.
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Don’t forget that between the writing of the report and today, the cost, adjusted for inflation, has risen to around $65,000.
Early estimates in the other thread listed the cost at around $40,000 for a conventional active crossing. Which would be cheaper than the Minnesota project.
I recall you mentioning that, but I don’t recall seeing estimates of $40,000 in that thread. Who provided that estimate, and what was it based on? What I recall were estimates around $750,000 for an active protection crossing.
The Minnesota project in 2005 estimated $40,000 for their active system and they said it was about 10% of the cost of the active systems being used today.
Did find $250,000, and the estimated $400,000, as well as a documented $768,000 for a full four quandrant set-up.
The Minnesota set-up was $40,000, with inflation taking that to some $60,000.
One could probably go through the shopping list for Rochelle and figure out a rough cost for two sets of lights and gates, along with the required sensing equipment.
Can’t we just find a maimed former operating department employee and construct a shack on the premises for them to live in and have them flag the crossing for food & WiFi until they die?
From what I gathered from that report it seems that in effect the active crossing signal would be controlled by signals transmitted from the train itself, as opposed to using line-side detecting gear. I had thought that systems like that had been created by the 1920s (like many other technologies), but whatever.
I will say the art director for that report blew it on Figure 1-1, where the “Passive Control” image on the left has 2 “Active Control” crossing lights standing out along the main-line crossing in the image, while the actual example of a “Passive Control” cross-buck (along I guess a siding in front of the main route) is almost lost in the visual clutter behind the round R/R crossing sign - rather poor composition.
As for figure 4-1. which I guess was created by the director’s pre-school children, the clip-out steam loco weathervane coupled with the pinkish London Double-Decker bus kinds of drops the ball on presenting a professional look…
Hmm, a number of times so far this year I’ve had good use for that old 1950s Plymouth ad slogan (trimmed a bit):
“Suddenly, it’s 1960…”
The use of PTC has been mentioned as a means of controlling grade crossing protection systems. The theory is that since PTC knows where trains are located, it will know when a train is approaching a grade crossing.
As PTC was rolled out, there were proposals to include grade crossing protection activation in the PTC function. However, as I understand, the primary purpose was not to use PTC as an alternate means of controlling grade crossing protection.
The main purpose was to notify the crew of an approaching train if the crossing was fouled by a stalled vehicle before the vehicle came into sight of the engineer. This would be an entirely new feature, never before offered. It would amount to PTC being used to detect track obstructions far in advance of an approaching train such as is done by slide protection and broken rail detections.
So this would take advantage of the ability to warn the engineer of a fouled crossing while there is time to stop short of a collision. Otherwise, that advantage cannot be taken if the engineer has to wait until the fouling is within eyesight, and thus not allowing enough time/distance to stop the train.
As of a couple years ago, a baseline cost for a newly-installed lights-and-gates system on a 24’ rural road and a single-track railroad, with no nearby intersections, major hills or curves (in the road), switches, signals, detectors, etc. was around $200 - $250k installed. Projecting backwards, in 2005 that cost would probably have been around $150k. The demonstration project set out to reduce the cost to $15k (around 90% reduction), and wound up costing about $40k. If you read the whole report, you will see that the 3x cost overrun mostly came about because the people writing the spec for the project were, like one or more people on this board, willfully ignorant about the actual requirements of a railroad signaling system.
A few comments or highlights to mention from the report:
1.) The equipment installed included flashing lights, but no gates. In 2022, I don’t beli
I have them on my truck - don’t really know if they work or not - have passed many deer on the side of the road when I do my nighttime traveling. Haven’t seen any react one way or another.
I’ve hit a couple of deer with locomotives… And a few other animals as well.
They get spooked and don’t know which way to run (just like on the highway). Sometimes they go the correct way, sometimes they get hit.
A contractor was driving our pumper for some maintenance. On his way, a deer crossed in front of him. It was airborne, taking out a windshield wiper, among other things. On a custom pumper… The deer was every bit of four feet above the road surface.
When I had my Dodge Daytona I got hit by a deer that couldn’t stop on wet pavement. It was the 3rd of three that ran across my route on a 40 MPH roadway - the first two made it, the 3rd one applied his brakes in full service but his hooves didn’t have any grip on the wet pavement and it took out my passenger side mirror. Looking at my rear view mirror I saw it shake its head and stumble along in the direction of its friends.
The least possible protected grade crossing has only the protection of being identifiable just by the appearance of a crossing deck built across the roadway. With such a crossing, the only protection is the driver’s awareness of the crossing and his/her wariness toward it in watching out for approaching trains.
From that point, every bit of added protection reduces driver wariness. In other words, drivers will naturally depend on the protection and lower their own perception of danger accordingly. For instance, they will pass through an inactivated active crossing without looking both ways.
So, it follows that every active grade crossing today makes every passive grade crossing more dangerous than it would be if all crossings were passive. This is because drivers have become habituated to relying on the maximum protection of the flashing lights, bells, and gates of active crossings, which lowers their wariness accordingly. Then with that habitual state of lowered wariness, they apply that to passive crossings. Primarily they forget the need to look for trains.
One early morning some years back, we were approaching a railroad crossing on a double tracked main line. We were going slow because of a temporary 25mph slow order. About 150 feet south of the crossing was a 4 way stop. The north/south street was the busier route, the east/west was a stretch of the old Lincoln Highway, still paved with bricks. (Since this happened, it’s now a 2 way stop, stop required for people on the old highway, when it’s not closed to traffic.)
I noticed a northbound car. It stopped at the 4 way intersection, with nothing in sight. The crossing has gates and lights and they were working, the gate fully lowered. After stopping, the car drove up to the crossing and proceeded around the lowered gates.
I have a question for this driver. Not why he/she risked his/her (probably his) life by going around the gates, he/she saw us and assumed the gates were down because we were slowly approaching. (It would’ve been a surprise if the gates were down because a faster train on the adjacent track had been coming.) I want to know why this driver stopped at the 4 way stop with nothing in sight.
I’m not against having active lights and gates. But I cringe everytime a vehicle is hit at a crossing equipped only with the crossbucks and the media calls it “unprotected.” The crossing was protected, the crossbucks mean something. A crossing like that is more protected than many rural county road intersections, some of them quite busy.
Now for something completely different. We have deer whistles on our vehicles. The instructions say they work over 30 mph. I’ve heard they work and don’t work, and have had some experiences both ways. I think if the deer is just milling about next to the road, eating in the ditch, thinking about crossing, etc., that the whistles get their attention and alert them to the vehicle.