We have an old spur line that runs very close to some houses in a small town. At one spot, the houses are about 10-15’ away from the track. The spur only serves one customer, and it’s one of the types of places that will order a dozen cars twice a week, then not get a car in for months.
We usually are shoving cars to them, so we have to stop and protect the 3 crossings (which is good since we usually travel that track at 3 in the morning), so that means that there is very little (if any) horn blowing. But there is one spot where the track sinks and the locomotive’s snowplow will scrape the top of the railhead. To get an idea of what that sounds like, think what nails on a chalkboard sound like, only about 100x louder.
I often wonder if these people were told that rail line was abandoned by the real estate agents (it sure looks that way in a few spots).
Is this one in Waterloo, Ontario, close enough to count?
No, I didn’t live in it, and wonder about the chronology. I assume the house was there first and the owner only sold the minimum necessary. The track close to the house is the CNR branch to Elmira, and the one you can just see in the bottom left corner is that of CPR’s Grand River Railway, electrified until 1961.
There is an old ROW up near Monkton ON that a friend and I had found that came to approximately 20’ of this old farmhouse. I’ve always wondered about how that must have effected their sleep—but then when I lived at those apartments right by the CP main —well—
The book “Steam Over Palmerston” by Ian Wilson(?)—can’t seem to find the dang book now—has a number of photos in it that show this division point town back in the late 1950’s with a few houses pretty darn close to the CN yards. There is one that has a back staircase coming to within 15’ of a branch of a wye----with a tricycle about 10’ away—
I remember when my brother-in-law was buying a house, and was told that the nearby railroad “wouldn’t be much of a problem.” My sister heard that, and called me. It didn’t take long for me to figure that this was CSX’s main line north of Plymouth, and would probably be a tad busier than the realtor was trying to suggest. Still, they all went and looked at the house, and felt the vibrations as a long freight went through, and the deafening sound of the horn blowing in their backyard for the nearby grade crossing. They didn’t buy that house. The house they bought instead was some distance from the tracks, and though that part of the equation disappointed me, I was happy that they were happy (and close enough to the tracks and some good trackside eateries).
In my home town–not a jam-packed city by any stretch–C&O’s tracks ran diagonally through the older part of town, causing for some strangely-shaped lots. One house was on a small triangular corner lot, with the track as the hypotenuse. The house in the lot next to it had only a driveway between its front porch and the tracks, said driveway paralleling the tracks to get to the street, joining with the driveway of the next house in the process. Both of those houses were set back in their lots because of the tracks. A similar situation existed for a commercial establishment in the next block–much of its driveway and small parking lot were comprised of limestone ballast.
Two blocks away from that, my dad’s store had a distinctly narrower section in the rear, caused by the curve of the adjacent track. His access to the back of the store was via a driveway along the tracks from the street behind him, curving around a switch stand and allowing access to the garage of a house on that street as well. Not too surprisingly, I would manage to get to the store around closing time, after an evening of train-watching (hopefully!) for a ride home in my dad’s pickup truck.
Nope - I think heavy rail traffic might have been a dealbreaker for them, but it’s a quiet line for the most part, a single track branch.
What probably came closer to being a deal breaker was the wastewater treatment plant that will (fortunately) be downwind most of the time. Apparently the noise isn’t too bad.
I did hear a train blowing for a crossing, however, probably on the CSX Chicago Line which is only 3-4 miles away. Plenty of traffic there!
