When the QZ was established, all the other crossings in town (all to the west) were modified with median lane dividers. The only thing they did at Story Street was to add the “No Train Horn” sign. (Which I didn’t include in the view.) The pedestrian gates were already there. Sidewalks at other crossings in town had a sort of zig-zag fence added. I guess to get people’s attention, since there isn’t any barrier when the signals are activated.
I asked a company officer why Story was included in the QZ without modifications. He said it was allowed because it was close to the other crossings in the zone. It doesn’t make much sense to me to do that. I could maybe see if it was close to crossings where the horn was regularly sounded, so maybe there are other reasons at play.
What may be of interest here is this year BNSF rebuilt the entire Mason Street corridor joint with the city. The railroad is now only paved under at intersections (no more street running) with curb and gutter plus drainage between intersections hoping to speed up traffic. Major problem this year remains pedestrians (1 fatal and two serious injury amputations)…Don’t think a quiet zone is going to happen until FTC shows FRA and PUC they can lower the incident rate. (the locals, not the railroad, are the problem). The railroad, by habit and tacit agreement, already tries to avoid running through town in prime hours. Also not shown is the fact that the north end of the Mason Street corridor falls r
Durand, MI, on the CN mainline, has four quiet zone crossings. None have more than the standard gate, no center divider, no pedestrian gates, no audible warning other than bells. TTBOMK, there has not been an accident there since they went quiet. It’s a town of 4,000 and all the locals know about no horns.
I did a little looking (FRA site) and Durand’s QZ was grandfathered in. It existed before the current rules were adopted.
I also learned that a crossing only needs lights and regular gates if it meets or beats certain safety statistics. (Chances of an accident relative to other crossings.) Only if it doesn’t does it then need something more, like lane dividers or 4-quad gates.
There is a calculator to figure out whether a crossing needs the upgrades, but it wanted a username and password to access. It makes me wonder though on how they come to their figures. Story Street is the main N/S route through the business section of town. I would have thought if any crossing wouldn’t have needed upgrades, it would be one of the lesser used side streets.
On the ConRail “handshake” quiet zones that you also mentioned a few posts above: A few years ago I read that a lot of them were private crossings, and some had no authorization or approval at all - people just made them to suit their convenience.
A few miles from me is a rail line, where I have to wonder about strict compliance with the horn rules, especially for the second crossing in the middle of the residential area just behind the downtown main street, and also a few similar private crossings further up the line. I don’t hear near the number of horn signals that I would expect for a train on that line, especially in the middle of the night . . . [:-^]
The small community of Hancock, NY is located on the former Erie main, hard by the east branch of the Delaware River. (The O&W went through Hancock, too, but that’s another story.)
In addition to a big truss bridge and a pretty sharp curve, there are at least a half dozen crossings in town. Speeds are pretty slow, so every crossing needs to be blown for.
At six AM on a Sunday morning, the crews usually try to keep the noise to a minimum. And that’s one time when they usually seem to come through…
If you’re camping on the fireman’s field (right next to the river and across the river from the tracks) and you might have had one or two too many the night before (as several of our group did), you might be known to say that you thought the train was coming right through your tent. I, on the other hand, was hustling to get out and get a good view…
In response to K. P. Harrier’s recent post, the crossing in his second picture is not a quiet zone crossing. It’s a crossing with a wayside horn (sometimes called “horn-on-a-stick”). In other words, there’s an electronic apparatus at the crossing which blows a horn down the street so that the locomotive doesn’t have to sound its own horn. The “flashing light on a pole” shows the engineer of an oncoming train that the wayside horn device is functioning. If the light isn’t flashing, the engineer must sound the locomotive horn.
First of all, everyone active on this thread should be aware that there are two other recent threads on the train horn rule - “Quiet Zone Questions” and “Silenced Automobile Crossings.”
With respect to the question of how “they” (presumably FRA) come to their figures, I just posted a note on the “Quiet Zone Questions” thread, which has links to pertinent FRA documents that have most of these gory details.
What’s probably happening in your “Story Street” example is that “Story Street” is one of several crossings in the quiet zone. Under FRA’s “quiet zone” methodology, you look at the safety of the quiet zone as a whole. This means that it’s not always necessary to make improvements at all of the crossings in a quiet zone. For example, if you have a quiet zone with 5 crossings, and you can get the quiet zone risk level low enough to satisfy FRA requirements by making improvements at only 3 of the crossings, then that’s all you have to do.