I am just curious about when a train gets near a crossing they blow the whistle, but is there a buzzer or something to let you know that there is a crossing coming up. Like if a new conductor doesnt know the rail and he doesnt know there is a crossing is there a warnbing that one is coming up. Always wondered[:)]
i believe that there are “whistle posts” so many miles before the crossing, however, with todays technology, im sure theres some GPS or something involved.
There are signs posted several hundred meters out from the crossing in either direction, and the engineer is paid to watch for them…among other things. Can’t say if there is also a warning buzzer when the loco enters the electrified grid for the gates. Sounds plausible to me.
There are whistle sign posts usually about a 1/4 mile from the crossing on the engineers side of the locomotive.
I was driving across what I thought was an abandond siding, (no gates, lights or bells,just a crossbuck) I got 10 feet on the other side of it and looked in my rear veiw mirror to see a switcher flying across the crossing. No horn,bells or any kind of warning!
If there was a marker or buzzer to let the engineer know, he wasn’t paying attension to it.
Don’t ever want to come that close again!!!
(Gulp). THAT was close, Loathar!! My Dad always warned us to stop, look, and listen. Sounds like that advice is still current.
CSX does that frequently in Hampstead over the Gill Road crossing. It is just a crossbuck, and the don’t always blow their horns as they should. This happened to my Mom, she had cleared the crossing, and looked in her mirror just to see a freigh speed across the road.
~[8]~ TrainFreak409 ~[8]~
Railroads do NOT just put you on a loco in new territory and let you go. You MUST know the road before you are allowed to run a train. I’ve run in fog so thick you could hardly see anything but still knew exactly where every signal and crossing was located.
I don’t believe that they are required to sound the horn at private grade crossings - on the ones I’ve seen, there are signs warning that you are crossing at your own risk.
From my own limited experience, good engineers blow the horn at every crossing, public or private.
A lot of the engineers around here are just lazy. I work across the street from the CSX Plymouth Sub and I can’t tell you how many times I here just a honk-honk or a hooooooonk on the horn rather than the required hoooonk hooooonk honk hooooonk.
A number of municipalities forbid by the blowing of horns at grade crossings.
And, of course, then complain if a train hits someone who didn’t know the train was coming…
Here we’ve got a sort of “pedestrian corridor” over a track from a housing subdivision. I think it’s a shortcut for the residents to walk to a large shopping mall. The engineers dutifully blow the horn for this crossing, and the residents are ticked off at all the noise day and night and want the city to put a stop to it. Hey, I’d live there–that would be music to my ears and railfanning out my back door! But, like Ray pointed out above, they’d sure raise heck if the horns didn’t sound and someone got hit.