BLE Editor’s Note: Brother P.C. Bush is a member of BLE Division 197 in San Antonio, Tex.)
FORT WORTH, Texas — A woman in an old Plymouth pulled up to a railroad crossing in Corsicana.
According to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, She heard the blaring horn of an Amtrak train barreling toward her at 60 mph. She pulled the car up to the edge of the tracks and stopped. Just before the train reached the intersection, the Plymouth lurched forward, as if perhaps the woman had accidentally let her foot off the brake pedal. The car came to rest directly in the path of danger, with its front end protruding across the tracks.
The locomotive knocked the car into a nearby ditch.
The engineer, Pat Bush, had seen the car and hit the train’s brakes — little good that it did. The train was not significantly damaged. It ground to a stop a half-mile down the tracks. A conductor ran toward the mangled car.
Bush feared the worst.
“We called ambulances,” he recalled. “We searched in the ditch and around the car, and we couldn’t find anybody. After about five minutes, an older woman comes running up the dirt road, and she says, ‘Well, I figured I was going to need a wrecker, so I went to find a telephone.’ ”
Bush, 49, of Arlington, has worked for Amtrak since 1990. During that time, he has been involved in seven train-automobile crashes. None of the motorists who pulled into his path were killed — which is surprising. According to federal statistics, crashes at railroad crossings are 11 times as likely to result in death as crashes involving vehicles.
To perform his job, Bush must accept the inherent conflict between trains and autos. On a typical Amtrak run from Fort Worth to Oklahoma City, Bush says he crosses about 200 intersections, loudly blowing his horn each time.
He understands the common complaints about train noise from Fort Worth-Dallas residents who live near railroad tracks, but he said he was offended by a recent newspaper letter that blamed the noise on “inconsiderate engineers.”
Bush says that federal law requires him to begin blowing the train’s horn a quarter-mile before an intersection, and continue with a pattern of long and short honks until the train has reached the crossing. That means a train going 60 mph would have to blow its horn for at least 15 seconds before reaching the intersection. For trains going slower, or those passing several crossings in succession, the audio blast may have to continue for a minute or more.
“They think the engineers enjoy it? That whistle is eight feet behind my head. I don’t like that whistle,” Bush said.
Trains are equipped with data recorders similar to the “black boxes” on aircraft. When a train crashes, investigators check the data to see whether the engineer acted properly.
“If I don’t blow that whistle, I could lose my job,” Bush said.
Many residents who live near the tracks are annoyed by train noise, especially late at night, but engineers are bound by law to blow the horn without regard to the collateral audio-damage it might do to a good night’s sleep.