A stalled train happened in Barrington and delayed the fire deparment https://www.dailyherald.com/news/20180716/barringtons-perfect-storm-stalled-train-on-ejampe-blocks-ambulances Thoughts? Is Barrington beeing NIMBY? Thanks
Well, there’s maybe a little bit of NIMBY there, but I get their concern.
Apparently they’ve been working toward a solution, reference the funding they’ve already secured. Hopefully work will begin on that sooner rather than later.
As was noted in the article, traffic is far different than it had been pre-CN. However, the stalled train was mostly the luck of the draw.
They (Barrington) have had 10 years to fund and build their solution - additionally within the 10 years they SHOULD have developed a game plan for all crossings being blocked at the same time - THEY KNOW IT IS GOING TO HAPPEN - THEY KNOW IT HAS HAPPENED - THEY KNOW IT WILL CONTINUE TO HAPPEN.
A perfect storm!
Great timing too, literally the day after the town lost their appeal of a lawsuit trying to get CN to pay more towards grade separations.
Agree that they knew this could happen, and have not done enough to prevent it. A railroad is a railroad, and even when the EJ&E was independent there was nothing stopping them from running numerous long trains every day.
But it didn’t prior to CN. Once CN took over, things changed. Some communities did force CN to make some changes as a condition of the takeover, as I recall.
Yes, operations changed. But the rules that would have allowed them to run long trains did not, which was why CN did not have to jump over the moon to close the EJ&E deal.
Obviously there are also rules governing how long trains may block crossings. I don’t know the American regulations, but in Canada a through train is not allowed to stop on a crossing for more than 5 minutes before starting a move to clear said crossing. Of course, if one interprets our rules directly then there is no time limit as long as the train is moving.
We are also supposed to clear the crossing as quickly as possible when emergency vehicles require passage. But a problem such as a broken air hose makes it physically impossible to move the train until it is repaired. And if a large traffic jam develops or the train is strung out around a curve the emergency vehicles may not be visible to the train crew.
1 hour to fix a busted air hose sounds about right to me.
About a hour per mile of train length is about right. Remember any inspection must originate from the head end to the rear end and then back to the head end. So a one mile long train is a two mile stroll for the Conductor. A two mile long train is a four mile walk for the Conductor.
When you hear 4 MPH being ‘walking speed’ it is - on a hard surface without many slip, trip and fall obsticals. Railroad rights of way are not hard surface walkways and have many slip, trip and fall situations to protect against.
Yep, will have the train moving in 5 minutes. [/sarcasm]
This one must have been near the head end.
Additional factors to consider include the Conductor’s physical fitness and pre-planning, is he already packing a spare hose and wrench?
I got tired long ago of explaining to Trainmasters that there is no such thing as a “5-minute move”.
One way ballast is graded is by the slope it will hold. Track on an embankment may have ballast (and fill) at a 45 degree angle (or steeper) right next to the track. Getting through that involves hanging on to the cars for dear life, hoping you don’t lose your grip when your feet go out from under you…
While you’re carrying that hose and wrench.
And we’re not necessarily talking embankments of tens of feet. A six footer is just as miserable.
Does CN have any rules about insuring that HAZMAT is on the rail when performing the inspection for a UnDesired Emergency brake applicaion? CSX does (or at least did when I was working). While you may find the problem in the first 10 cars of a 12000 foot train - if HAZMAT is in the rear portions of the train - those cars must be visually verified as being on the rail before proceeding.
And this was 5-4 years after the Barrington had a dispute with the Barrington Countryside Fire Protection District, this forced them to basically become two seperate FD’s. Before 2013-2014 Barrington had more stations so if something like this happened things like this wouldn’t happen as frequentley. Yes Barrington has it’s priatories streight sarcasm off.
Nevertheless, CN runs much longer trains that often block crossings for more than the legal time limit.
Darch said the trains have gotten longer and slower since Canadian National purchased the EJ&E railroad tracks in 2008. She said the village has argued for ten years that CN should pay a portion of the $73.5 million grade separation project at Route 14 to prevent future incidents.“It’s a cost of doing business to bring freight through a town and completely block it up,” Darch said. “There should be a greater amount of money spent to mitigate that impact.”
Perhaps it is time to regulate train lengths?
BTW, for those who like to say in regards to responsibility “the railroad was there first” it’s not true in this case. Barrington goes back to 1834, while the Waukegan and Southwestern (absurbed by the EJ&E) to 1890.
If the village just ponied up the ~ $3.6M they want CN to pay, they’d have had the project done five years ago…
I do get that they want CN to pay part of the cost, but if they’re going to wait for CN, it’ll be another ten years - unless they get someone to force CN to pay up. Of course, just the work to get a bridge in place under a working rail line should be interesting…
The Illinois Commerce Commission is the final arbiter of who pays for what and you aren’t hearing much about the ICC opinions up until now. Apparently the Section 400 funding has gone elsewhere in the state as a funding priority…and they have taken all that railroad tax money from the state (Paid to the state under the watchfull eyes of the feds and disbursed semi-annually to the locals) thank you, thank you very much, … of course the newsworkers don’t see that side of the story.[:-,]
Barrington’s lack of planning and growth over decades helped contribute to the mess. Sorry it happened, but… (and fortunately there was no major issues to the ambulance users as a result). Not NIMBYs per se, but rather generations of bad local government.
mudchicken wrote the following post[in part]: “…Barrington’s lack of planning and growth over decades helped contribute to the mess. Sorry it happened, but… (and fortunately there was no major issues to the ambulance users as a result). Not NIMBYs per se, but rather generations of bad local government…”
This seems to be a prople all over this country, in many places, as towns and cities have ‘grown up’ around railroads and traffic volumes have swelled also. Politicians seem to have universally, adopted the ‘head in the sand’ approach to obovious problems; they seem to wait for clamities, or the problem to get so great the citizenry get up in arms. then their fall-back position is look for someone else to foist their problem on. Its’ called the 'buying time, til I get out of office approach[ie; The let 'George’do it ploy… Not an uncomon approach in political circles. Not to mention, any report on Illinois, and Chicago politics seems seems to ‘fall’ on the argument that the State is Billions in the 'RED" and is dancing on the edge of bankruptcy… I think Barrington’s chances are probably going to happen; when that snowball survives a trip to perdition,and back? [:-^]
Doesn’t Barrington belong to a district or county emergency dispatching center? If so, or even if not, there has to be some way in this day and age for a quick request for mutual aid to get to the scene from the other direction.
Note: I was unable to open the article so I’m not aware of the particulars. But that is how an emergency response would normally be handled. No train delays in our area but we have had road closures due to accidents or weather that had other units respond or, if ambulances with patients, rerouted to other hospitals.
The fire department does have mutual aid pacts with surrounding departments, and that general area is well-known for their Mutual Aid Box Alarm System.
The case cited in the article involved ambulances enroute to hospitals. There must be other routes to said hospitals - Barrington is hardly an “island.”
The Mudchicken is right about poor decisions by the local government. The village board reflects the attitudes of the residents, most of whom are rather prosperous and are quite resentful when the rest of the world invades their special corner of Gehenna.
I got the distinct impression from the story that the ‘injuries’ were known to be minor, and very likely no special effort was made (or considered necessary) to contact the crew to split the consist.
Of course when the issue of ‘emergency crews were held up!’ gets to the political level, this gets lost in the sauce.
What IS important is to find out how easy and direct it would be to get an ambulance across an occupied crossing in case of bona fide medical emergency. (Or find a direct re-routing to an open crossing or existing split ASAP).