Saturday night, my father and I went out to La Fox Road for Metra 66.
Today, my mother and I went out to La Fox Road for Metra 503. I noticed 2 things different:
The 2 annoying crossing bells had been replaced with a single quieter electronic bell;
The engineer on Metra 503 did not start blowing for the crossing until he was pretty much on top of me, and he was moving at a good rate of speed.
I was just wondering…Has La Fox Road become a “quiet crossing”? I sure hope not but the 2 “stand-out” factors together made me wonder. My mother said
the crossing doesn’t look any different and I’m rather surprised that they replaced the bell on Sunday or today.
To the best of my knowledge (that’s as of work yesterday), LaFox Road is still not a quiet-zone crossing. Your engineer may have been violating the new rules if his crossing signal wasn’t long enough.
Pat and I plan on being in LaFox for a little while tomorrow. She’ll be at the quilt shop–guess where I’ll be?
Have you heard of any plans to make La Fox Road a quiet crossing? I talked to a bus driver who drives a bschool bus in that area and he said it has been talked about in the bus barn for a while now; I was a little surprised that (1) they did it on a weekend and (2) I didn’t hear anything on the news about it. Usually UP would want to announce it and what not.
Take care, and please let me know what you observe there tomorrow (if you go before I do),
Sounds like you might have gotten there before me–we won’t be there until this afternoon.
I think there will be signs, etc., posted near the crossing in advance of its “conversion”. We employees will find out about it officially when it’s mentioned in a General Order. We haven’t had any orders changing anything on this line since April, so there have been no recent developments.
They’ll have to install some sort of median barrier, at the very least, to make the crossing eligible for conversion (I won’t like that, because we’d no longer be able to make a left turn out of the quilt shop–or post office–drive).
A median barrier is not required to make a crossing a quite zone. All the railroad have to do is either put a barrier like you stated, or they can use a 4 quadrant gate system.
We’ve already established Camp Mookie in a select section of Huskerville. No amenities, other than trains, tracks, and balky crossing gates.
SJ, I’m not sure where the name comes from–you’re pretty well out of the Fox River valley by the time you get to LaFox. And the people who call Illinoisans “flatlanders” need go no further than this grade crossing to get the answer to that–just look up and down the tracks!
Michael, we were at the quilt store and the crossing for roughly an hour. Nothing unusual about the crossing signals that I could see, or hear–both electronic bells were working. One westbound freight did give a shortened crossing signal, but I think that was the engineer’s problem (sounded nothing at all like a crossing signal, only three toots). The following westbound train sounded the conventional signal, starting well back from the crossing.
Does anyone know if it is possible to change the pitch and speed of the electronic bells that UP uses? I tell you, the bell sounded way different yesterday and back to normal today; the pitch was lower and there was just one bell ringing.