(The Antioch Review posted the following article by Irv Leavitt on its website on January 15.)
ANTIOCH, Ill. — Municipal leaders across the U.S. have waited years for new federal rules to define what’s required to preserve the train horn bans in their communities.
Now that they’ve got the rules, many town leaders say they don’t completely understand them, and don’t like what they do understand, Federal Railroad Administration officials acknowledged last week.
The rules, published last month, require certain standards for railroad crossings if trains are to be exempt from sounding their horns as they cross. Some suburban railroad crossings may cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to upgrade.
And the railroad administration can’t guarantee horn waivers for every crossing that gets that expensive fix, a federal spokesmen said.
Since the horns can sound at up to 100 decibels, residents who live near crossings don’t want them sounding each time a train traverses a crossing.
And local leaders are frustrated because “Nobody has got the authority or the guts to say” whether the horns have to sound at a given location, Northbrook Village Manager John Novinson said last Thursday. “The responses we are getting (to questions about standards) do not even rise to the Supreme Court’s ‘I’ll know it when I see it’ standard.”
Old statistics
Federal Railroad Administration spokesman Warren Flatau Friday said his agency’s traffic counts and inventoried safety features at many individual rail crossings are decades old, and won’t give towns an accurate picture of whether given crossings are meeting the standards. Two years ago, railroads were asked to update those statistics, but haven’t finished the job, Flatau said.
Larry Bury, head of transportation for the Northwest Municipal Conference, said Friday that the new rules are so difficult to apply that the railroad administration ought to extend its period for public comment on them far beyond a Feb. 17 deadline. That deadline is 60 days after the rules were published.
Flatau said Monday it’s likely the railroad administration would extend the deadline if U.S. House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-14, asks. As of Monday, he hadn’t, Flatau said.
Hastert’s office didn’t return calls.
Panic?
Flatau called some reactions to the published rules and the deadline overwrought, since all the towns have to complete by next Dec. 18 is a preliminary plan to increase safety at their rail crossings. He said administration engineers are expected to fan out across the area in late February to help municipal officials start their plans. And in a couple of weeks, the agency also intends to publish a list crossings it believes are safe enough to warrant a waiver from the horn rule.
Towns have five years to implement safety plans before any horns would be federally mandated. If state agencies — here, the Illinois Commerce Commission and Illinois Department of Transportation — join municipalities in crafting individual plans, municipalities have eight years.
Bury said last Thursday that Illinois’ shortage of civil engineers in both public agencies and private practice means the state agencies might not be able to help each town, and that individual villages will have trouble finishing plans.
“I think it’s going to come down to a competition between communities for engineers (experienced in railroad work) to make it by the five-year deadline. I’m really concerned that five years is not the right amount of time.”
Tammy Wagner, regional crossing safety manager for the railroad administration, said Monday that five years may seem short because towns will have to get railroad officials to sign off on new safety plans. When it comes to transportation agencies, “we’re all short-staffed, especially in the Chicago area,” she said.
Favored fix
Bury said it may be tough for ICC and IDOT to sign off on the railroad administration’s favored fix for railroad crossings, four-quadrant gates designed to keep motorists from weaving around them. He said the ICC is still testing the gates, to ensure the gates won’t trap traffic-stalled cars on railroad tracks.
Cost is critical, too. Bury said new four-quadrant gates cost at least $300,000.
The Federal Railroad Administration can be reached at 1120 Vermont Ave. NW, Washington D.C. 20590, or online at www.fra.dot.gov.