This can cause a potential for tied up auto traffic. As happened at 5:40pm Fri. evening (2/2) in Middletown, Delaware. On the north side of Middletown, Del. Rt. 71 veers left off of U.S. 301 and crosses NS’s Delmarva Sub. Well, the gates at the sub were down with no train approaching. This caused a mile long backup that I (coming home from work) got stuck in.
What causes gate glitches?
motor
An excellent question, and perhaps you’ll start getting answers when the Super Bowl is over.
I for one would like to know whom to complain to, and whether that would vary depending on who blames whom for the glitches. All the aggravation you’ve been caused, and you might just be the only person who contacted someone about it, instead of just grousing at the dinner table.
Al
Al,
on the side of the signal cabinet is a 1 800number to call, with a signal number or a milepost number.
Please report all malfunctioning signals…if they stay “broke” we end up having to flag through the crossing, real pain for us too!
Super Bowl, Smooper Bowl.
Crossing gates are generally triggered by a track circuit. That means something is creating a short between the rails in the section of track involved. Under normal circumstances that’s a railroad locomotive or car.
Water, road salt, and other conductive stuff in the roadbed can also create such short. It causes nightmares for signal maintainers. They face a constant battle between ensuring that the sensing equipment is sensitive enough to detect a train, and not so sensitive that normal (no train present) conditions will trigger the gates.
There is also the possibility of an equipment failure (ie, stuck relay, fried electronics, whatever) causing such a problem.
As for reporting such a problem - take a close look next time you’re near a crossing. Somewhere on the crossbuck should be a small sign detailing who owns the crossing, it’s exact milepost, a unique crossing identification number, and most important - the number to call if there is a problem. There are those among us who have the appropriate numbers programmed into our cell phones. If you’re going to call, make note of all of the info on the sign first, if you can.
Smooper Bowl[(-D]
must be a patriots fan.
I’ve started to see a lot of RF controllers, where a sensor between the tracks communicates with the nearby control cabinet via radio signal.
And, I think they have a problem with interference , some times.
I saw one gate repeatedly activate, then go back to normal, (rinse lather repeat, etc) several times over a 10 minute period…then just start behaving normally
Nah - I see more minutes of pro football in highlights than during games any more. Just doesn’t interest me.
Re the :Smooper Bowl", welcome to the club, tree68. I didn’t watch a second of SB XLI.
I forgot to mention that that malfunction in Middletown took place during a wintry mix of precipitation.
I’ve seen gates down with no trains around in dry, sunny summer weather (Felton, DE, further south on the Delmarva Sub, comes to mind).
motor
The Trains.com member gathering in Lincoln last October witnessed several “false alarms” of the crossing gates at Mookie’s spot- after thinking about it, I wonder if it had anything to do with them realigning switches on either/both sides of the crossing for the next train coming through. In those cases, though, the gates would not stay down for very long.
Brian - they are improved, but still do jumping jacks a lot - especially the one that was closest to where we were sitting. They have them set now so that when a train comes from the north, it is barely in sight and that crossing is already going nuts. Getting ready for the big onslaught of traffic when they close the overpass into town.
Nothing’s perfect. The track gates – or, for that matter, all active crossings and the rest of the signalling systems – are designed to be ‘fail safe’ (in rare cases, ‘fail operational’ – but that’s very hard to do). That is, if something happens which shouldn’t, the gates are designed to activate. Could be a raft of things, as tree68 and others have noted. Considering the weather you’ve been getting, my bet would be on road salt, but…
The bottom line question is, though, which would you rather have? A gate which activated when these was no train, or one which didn’t activate when there was? In the former case, the worst that should happen is some inconvenience to the motorists, until some bright soul calls the 1-800 number and the local constabulary and the railroad can get there to manage the situation. In the latter case, ah… let’s not go there.
I find in many instances, though, that a minor traffic inconvenience causes motorists, as a group, to go ballistic – a sad symptom of our very very selfish society (how dare someone interfere with my personal plans! I’ll Sue!)
Railroad Crossing Signals/Gates are designed to FAIL SAFE!
If a signal detection circuit fails in any manner, it is designed to go to the safest possible indication…usually STOP.
Crossing signals/gates are no different. If there is any kind of failure in the approach circuit, the signals will activate.
All such crossing signals/gates are required to post the location of the signal and a phone number to the public can make a report. The location is usually posted with both the railroad milepost and public crossing identies.
another common cause especially with the cold weather you described is a broken rail in the circuit for the crossing gate. As said earlier, gates are just like signals and go to fail safe when something interupts the circuit. A broken rail is just another failure in the circuit.
Caught some kids giggling as they hunted for the relay device to trip the signals once.
Occasionally where I am the signals do drop down and stay put with the crickets going and nary a train in sight. I would sit and look both ways and not move. People around get impatient and start to go around the gates.
After a while those gates stay down and people just monkey see monkey do as in Rome rolling through when a train does show up. Im glad I dont get out much.
I think once I called into the railroad when one trucker apparently went ahead and pushed through a down signal gate forcing the thing back across the track to stab an approaching locomotive cab. They fixed that right quick, never did catch the driver.
This talk about signals brings back memories of a very dense wooded area on a two lane state road near I-66 where we truckers used CB radios for a mile in either direction to track that train at that crossing. The problem there was it’s on a blind curve and at 55 mph the last thing you will see is that train 15 yards in front. We always showed 5-10 mph creeping up onto that signal that was ALWAYS on especailly early in the am. Now that I think of it, I never saw a train.
They should just elevate the whole smash 22 feet over every street and be done with it.
When I was a kid I saw older kids - teenagers use an old metal fence post placed across the rails. Many times I saw the gates going up and down for no reason, look down the tracks and there they are tying up traffic. They used to wait for the traffic to stop on the tracks and then put the gates down on the cars. After a while sometimes people would be out holding the gates up.
Not so easy to do that now. Crossing signal equipment is vastly more sophisticated now. Modern installations use what’s called a “Grade Crossing Predictor” that looks at the rate of change of an approaching train, predicts when the train will arrive at the crossing, and activates the crossing warning devices (bells, flashers, gates) at the correct warning time. Because the GCP measures acceleration or deceleration of the train it can detect that trains that are slowing to a stop short of the crossing will “never” reach the crossing and thus doesn’t activate the warning devices. An “island circuit” at the crossing itself detects when the train has left the crossing, in order to deactivate the warning devices, and will activate the warning devices if shunted no matter what state the system might be in.
Because a GCP measures rate of change instead of detecting a simple shunt in an approach circuit, crossing warning devices are much less subject to inappropriate activation from wet track then they used to be.
By the way, broken rails causing crossing warning devices to activate is an exceedingly rare event.
S. Hadid
i always was wondering that too.
i also have a question. if anyone knows, why is it that some crossings have bells that shut off after the gates are fully down? what’s the point?