BaltACD
From your continued questions - you don’t understand the private corporation status under which the railroads in the USA exist. Railroads run their own operating plans - they are permitted to operate non-clearing trains if they so desire. Some managements lose their common sense and seek to operate non-clearing trains in both directions over single track line segments, they do so at their own level of inefficiency.
Again I agree…
It is a fundamental legal concept concerning private property and real estate that I have to say I am surprised that more Trains forum readers do not comprehend. Why the heck do you think a Home Owners Association Contract is so lengthly and requires your signature. Because it is a direct amendment to your existing private property rights that your agreeing to abide by in return for living in a specific area. Without that amendment, nobody has the right to tell you what color you paint your house, what trees are replaced with what bushes and/or on and on because it is your private property.
Real Estate law states you cannot take someones property or dictate it’s use without just compensation. Weather you like the definition or not, it is viewed as a confiscation of property and infringement on property rights by the government. The only loop hole around that is the use of Emminent Domain. The government cannot just step in and tell a Corporation how to operate on private property just for kicks. The government has to prove either a safety consideration impacting others OR common good overrules the property rights (Emminent Domain). It can pass regulations on how a business in general operates.
Your suspicion that municipal speed restrictions and state or local laws against blocking crossings are not enforceable in the U.S.
You are not correct that “nobody has really challenged them”. Railroads have brought a string of lawsuits against blocked crossing laws in the last two decades - pretty much any time someone has tried to enforce them - and have successfully blocked enforcement in every single case. Regarding speed restrictions, I know of a single case where the railroad lost, but that is the exception that proves the rule.
If you are suggesting that regulation of railroads’ blockages of crossings or speed limits is somehow prohibited because it interferes with their property rights, there is no basis in case law for that suggestion. Instead, the decisions all turn on two federal laws: the Federal Rail Safety Act, which gives the FRA jurisdiction over all safety aspects of railroading, and the Interstate Commerce Commission Termination Act, which gives the STB exclusive jurisdiction over all non-safety aspects of railroad operations. Both federal laws have clauses that explicitly disallow state or local regulation of railroad operations under many circumstances. Blocked crossing laws and municipal speed restrictio
(1) Federal rule trumps state and local rule every time.
(2) If there is no memorandum of agreement letter between FRA/STB and the locals, any concocted local rule has no weight or validity.
(3) In the case of old whistle bans that still exist with the new No Train Horn rules, there is a mechanism to include those.
Locals are whining that the new No Train Horn rules are too expen$ive and the rules ought to be relaxed. After the derailment at Dennison Iowa and some others, there ought to be some serious investigation into the site investigation panel diagnostic field teams that evaluated the reasons for allowing no horn rule zones in the first place. (Dennison IA was a miserable fail that should have been caught for engineering reasons)…Hearing through the grapevine that several no-horn zones may be revoked for accident reasons and/or for failure to maintain the granted conditions.
Blocked crossing time limits genrerally extend only to public crossings and then if there is an emergency, switching or other condition in play, the rule on timing starts over every time the train moves, even a little bit. IF the railroad knowingly blocks a crossing (public) and fails to break the train at a public crossing - shame on them (esp the operating bubbas who should know better)…sounds like an operating problem and an urgent capital budget request item to me. If you change operating parameters and don’t look at the consequences - you ought to be responsible for the consequences (PSR be damned)
Even when crossing(s) are being cut - the crossing(s) itself can be blocked for extended periods of time depending upon how far the conductor had to walk in making the moves. Moves being the cutting or the recoupling of the crossings to facilitate the departure of the train.
How realistic are the Transport Canada rules of no more than a 5 min blockage of a railroad crossing for a freight train as long as it is not moving? Is that short time span really that enforceable? Did I misread that on the internet or is it really just 5 min? How is that complied with?
Engineers can and can be required to blow the horn under certain circumstances for safety’s sake. To warn railroad employees, nonrailroad people or animals. On two or more tracks, when approaching a crossing that a train on the adjacent track might clear the crossing before your train occupies the crossing. Overtaking a train that is stopped close or moving slowly on an adjacent track toward the crossing. (I’ve seen a near miss in this situation that wasn’t a quiet zone. Driver sees the slow train, but not the fast one on the other track hidden by the slow one.) If the crossing has been identified as having some sort of activation failure. (The failure could be a simple one such as a light burned out on the crossing signal.)
Five firefighters in Cardinal, Ontario were killed some years ago when they pulled onto a crossing once the train cleared. But there was that second train…
You read it correctly. But it is also important to read and think about the fine print. A long slow moving train could legally block a crossing for over an hour as it is walked over a broken rail, to pick one example.
The best way to comply with the rule is to not block the crossing in the first place. That’s why trains stop short of crossings in so many places, even though they might not be in the clear in a siding or might have several miles of double track still ahead of them.
If you are switching over a crossing you basically have to clear it between each and every move, and even then it is very difficult to do anything in 5 minutes so this part of the rule gets bent a lot. But Transport Canada seems to look the other way most of the time unless things get really excessive, and then they may pressure