Happened to run across this interesting news article about the apparent ONLY country-wide quiet zone for trains passing through a major city downtown area, where there are a considerable number of condominiums and hotels, to wit:
Even the citizen comments at the bottom show not only valid comments (Why did you buy next to a railroad in the first place?) but also a lack of awareness of railroading rules (Why does Amtrak have to blow its horn at crossings?).
A well-designed and planned quiet zone can work nicely, such as that on the CSX Blue Island Sub from 115th Street to just north of 95th Street. The grade crossings have quad gates and generally have good visibility. Also, the bell is to be rung at grade crossings, which helps. On the other hand, the quiet zone on the IC Iowa line in Elmhurst has a high-risk gap where the Illinois Prairie Path is crossed at grade with no real warning devices besides crossbucks and stop signs for bicycles.
The movement to ‘Quiet Zones’ is one that I have very mixed emotions about. Mostly personal, but I think I really try to undestand the reasoning, about them.
My first experiences with coexistence with a near-by railroad was in Tulsa,Ok. The house back up to the Midland Valley switch line that went from Tusla across the Arkansas River to the Refineries on the West Tulsa side. Seemed to be most active after 6 to 7 PM. The first couple of days, I heard every squeek and whistle. After awhile you never heard them.[2c]
MMY mother lived a block and a half from the first crossing south of the Parsons,Ks yard. I loved hearing the trains and actually rnjoyed the noise, again as I was there for some time I began to not really hear the noise. Until, the UPRR installed a self warning crossing, to create a ‘Quite Zone’. It has been equipped with the most annoying noisy horn I ever heard, sounds something akin to a goose being throttled. Been ‘quiet’ there two years and is still eminently annoying![2c]
Now where I live (within a quarter mile of the BNSF Transcon and six crossings. With a train per day count that exceeds anything I’d ever been exposed to; from maybe one an hour to several an hour. I have stated before I AM NOT an air horn Afficianado, I am constantly amazed as the parade goes down the tracks, of how many different sounds can be made by horns spec’d by one Railroad. You can hear every place between the melodic to what sounds like a scream from a mashed cat. And at night, early in the O Dark 30 hours, when two trains meet; You hear all sorts of racket from the hooters on those trains. Engineers trying to blow a resting conductor out of the cab, to specialized signals between two guys who either like each other or hate each other. Those signals are nowhere near anything elaborated on int the “Company Rule Book”.
I live about a quarter-mile from a mainline CSX (B&O) crossing in my eastern Ohio town, so I count myself an expert on locomotive horns. There are many nights where I never hear them at all, and there are other nights when the horns are so loud I think they’re going to come right right into my bedroom, depending on the weather conditions. It is so interesting to read the post about how one railroad can own so many different-sounding horns. Are all CSX horns Nathan Chimes?
A few years ago a visiting British minister commented in our newspaper how the train horns here, as opposed to the UK’s, made a sound like tremendous chords from a huge pipe organ! Good metaphor, I thought.
In the early 1980’s I traveled via the Ontario Northland Railroad to Moosonee. Those locomotives had horns that, to my ears, exactly reproduced the 2nd opening chord from Die Gotterdammerung by Richard Wagner! Every time the locomotive horn was sounded, I swear I looked for a guy behind me with a spear! Scary.
Some years ago I was aboard The Three Rivers as it passed 3 blocks from my own house on its way to the station stop in Akron. I asked the conductor to ask the engineer to blow the horn a lot as we passed my street in order that my wife could hear it and guess about what time I’d be home. This was in the wee hours of the morning. The engineer blew his horn as asked, probably waking up half the town in the process! My wife? Never heard a note. Too used to the horns, I guess.
I have my doubts about “quiet zones” but I’m willing to be persuaded by statistics and not just a gut feeling o
Paul, I’m delighted to find out that you know about the Prairie Path (and that crossing)! They do ring bells, though there, and, thanks to the stick rail, nothing goes through too quietly.
Back a half century or so ago I occupied two houses, one after the other.
Double track under catenary over the back fence - EMU trains on 15 minute or less headway both ways from 0-dark-hundred 'til well after midnight, plus ten or a dozen strings of limestone loads downgrade and the same number of empties upgrade every day except national holidays. IMHO, there is NOTHING as casually noisy as an empty side-dump hopper car. There was a grade crossing somewhat downhill, so the horns sounded about 10 meters from my kitchen window.
Single track over the back fence - DMU trains about an hour apart in each direction, or a half hour apart as spotted and heard over the back fence. Those same strings of limestone, this time loads upgrade and empties downgrade, plus an additional half-dozen mixed freights each way on a normal day. The freights were steam powered, sometimes doubleheaded. We were about half way between grade crossings, so got the full benefit of horn and whistle music from pre-dawn 'til after midnight, with the occasional 0230 special.
Nobody (except this one railfan) paid much attention to the noise (I loved it!) or the aroma of burning coal - but in the second neighborhood the housewives objected to the cinder fines raining out of the sky. If the wind was from the other side of the track they couldn’t hang wet wash out to dry…
As far as quiet zones are concerned, if the gates will absolutely, positively, prevent vehicles and pedestrians from having close encounters of the wrong kind, fine. If not, let the bereaved go to court against the entity that set them up, not the railroad that has to put up with them.
You know, with automatic grade crossing protection that keeps the bells ringing the entire time and uses four-quadrant gates, I really can’t understand the reason for whistles even during the day.
This reminds me, around what year did the bells stop ringing when the gate is fully lowered? I remember watching crossing signals as a kid and the bells never turned off. Is this some new thing?
This is a set-up that seems to vary by railroad and location. I can remember from my distant youth of grade crossing signals set up both ways, but then I can remember a lot of manually operated grade crossing signals, too.
Since we seem unwilling to implement the obvious solution and start a long term program to eliminate at grade crossings, I just have to ask:
If a person is not dissuaded by a long crossing arm with blinking lights on it accompanied by bells, what makes you think they will be dissuaded by a horn?
Perhaps for the truly reckless or suicidal we could install those pop up barricades that the paranoid government agencies use at the entrances to their parking garages.
Union Pacific in Kearney, Nebr. has at least two road crossings that have those electronic horns whose speakers project a blast of sound perpendicular to the tracks. The one crossing in the downtown business district bleats out a sound that is so loud and irritating that it feels like one’s head is about to explode. Why the downtown merchants put up with that racket is beyond my comprehension. To me, those remote control “horns” do NOT represent any civic improvement whatsover!
Along the Harvard Subdivision where I grew up in northwest suburban Chicago, the C.& N.W. had a quiet zone that stretched from the Chicago Passenger Terminal approximately to milepost 35. Many of those crossings had just flashers and no gates. In the 18-years my father regularly commuted over that route, I recall him saying that only once (or maybe twice) the train he was riding hit a vehicle. Of course his experience was decades ago when motorists not only were more responsible, but they weren’t so distracted by cell phones and loud noises pretending to be music.
Maybe the better solution would be to equip crossing gates with bright flashing strobe lights. So as not to be totally irritating, have the strobes come on as the gates go down and then quit flashing when the train occupies the crossing.
The problem with strobe lights, particulary multi-colored, but white as well, is that they can trigger epileptic seizures in those so prone. That could open a whole new can of worms,
A couple of posters have wondered why crossings protected by gates, lights and bells still need the whistles blown. That’s fail-safe – in case the in-place warnings should fail.
(See that poor Illinois woman killed recently when signal maintainers failed to reactivate the crossing devices on which they had been working. Of course, in that case the fail-safe didn’t work, either.)
Also, it relieves the engineer of having to make hundreds of independent decisions in the course of a trip: Do I blow for this crossing or not?
I too am of two minds about the quiet zones. My prejudice is to regard the whistle complainers as weenies who would do better to celebrate this sound of old-fashioned American industry; on the other hand, the whistles ARE significantly louder than they used to be.
I guess my bottom line these days is: If local taxpayers are so flush they can afford the luxury of eliminating or super-protecting grade crossings so as to banish whistles, let them go for it.
My fear about color strobe lights is that it might bring a torrent of lawsuits from people, mostly men, who came of age in the mid 1970’s. These men would claim that the railroad company, by installing these strobe lights, willfully encouraged these individuals to get out of their vehicles and start disco dancing on the roadway, thus causing them to be injured, either by hurting themselves (we’re dealing with older boomers here) or being struck by passing vehicles driven by younger motorists (no doubt talking on their cell phones or texting their friends about the train they were just watching) after the train cleared the crossing.
I think it was Finley Peter Dunn’s Mr. Dooley who once “said” “What looks like a stonewall to a layman, is but a triumphal arch to a corporate lawyer.” That was over 100 years ago. I think it’ll be true again when the inevitable lawsuits begin over the new “quiet” crossings.
Phoebe: You have asked before and I agree. But for some reason this simple but expensive solution is ignored by most posters. Our 3 in town crossings could be eliminated by 2 separations but it will never happen. Note: RR was there first.
We should have started long ago on a slow long term program to eliminate at grade crossings. Instead we are still building more of them. It is insane to put an automobile traffic conflict in the path of a train that takes a mile to stop from 45 MPH.
Our light rail vehicles are also a great example of the fact the train horns can be made highly directional.
There is a thing called the cost-benefit ratio, and eliminating the hundreds of thousands of at-grade crossings flunks it. For the expense of an underpass or overpass, see last year’s stories of the EJ&E takeover by CN. Closure would be possible in some cases but in most would result in expensive indirection, over time, for many motorists and would be politically difficult as well as economically indefensible.
Just as we accept, while regretting, the thousands of other automotive deaths every year as a cost of a free and mobile society, so we can accept, while regretting, those that occur at rail crossings (almost always the fault of a reckless or inattentive driver).
Also, it is not necessarily true that “we are still building more (at-grade crossings).” BNSF, for one road, has a “no-net-gain-of-crossings” policy that it has managed to make stick. That is, if you’re a city or county wanting to add an at-grade crossing, the railroad can flat turn you down. If you want to close another crossing in exchange, BNSF will look at it – sometimes.
If we had started 50 years ago, a huge number of those crossings would be gone by now. If we never start, we will never finish.
I never said that the cost should be born by the railroads.
Deaths, injuries, and property damage are not the only problems that at grade crossings cause. Tell me that you have never sat at a crossing for an extended length of time while a train was stopped on the crossing or while a 15 MPH 100 car train ambled by. Such crossings seriously disrupt traffic flow on some fairly busy roads. When a crossing accident does occur, the intersection can be taken out of service to both vehicles and trains for hours. I hope that never occurs between you and the ambulance, fire truck, or police officer that is trying to get to you.
Obviously the cost of doing it over the course of just a few years would be astronomical, but that does not mean it shouldn’t be done at all. How about if we start by eliminating any crossing that has had more than one vehicle/train accident in the last ten years.
More than one accident in the past 10 years? That’s probably a LOT of crossings. Of the branches I sometimes run on presently, the worst one for accidents is a branch that hosts one train 5 times a week. (one train, 2 crews - it gets re-crewed on the branch). But lots of country crossings, and 30mph train speed limit means there are a lot of smashups. Now is it really worth the money to build over or underpasses on a line that has one train a day? Or to put crossing gates up on the less-traveled roads? You could close the crossings, but now you have to send cars (and yes, ambulances) a mile or more out of their way to access the next crossing.
I never said to just close the road. Replace the crossing by running the road over or under it. One well designed overpass could replace several grade level crossings.
Cities do a great job of routing traffic over or under rivers. Do the same for the railroads.
It didn’t seem to be impossible to prohibit any grade level crossings on interstate highways.