OGDEN DUNES, Ind. — State officials will allow the town to impose a ban on nighttime train horns on the tracks near Lake Michigan if it pays for about $1 million in crossing improvements, the Henderson (Ky.) Gleaner reported.
The hefty costs of such work has town officials doubtful about quieting the trains on the busy tracks and has caused at least two other Indiana communities to drop similar efforts.
The Indiana Department of Transportation issued an order last week allowing Ogden Dunes to silence the train horns between 9 p.m. and 6 a.m., but it must first meet several safety requirements.
Those requirements, which would include installation of additional crossing gates, could cost more than $1 million, Mike Scime, the agency’s railroad section manager, told The Times of Munster for a story Thursday.
That is a bill the town of 1,300 people about 10 miles east of Gary can not afford, Town Council member Tom Clouser said.
The council passed the anti-horn ordinance in 2000 and filed a petition with state officials in July 2002 to implement the ban.
The request covers the crossing at the town’s only entrance on U.S. 12, which is crossed by four sets of tracks.
About 95 freight and Amtrak trains run a day over the two main line tracks owned by Norfolk Southern. About 40 freight and South Shore commuter trains per day run over the second set of tracks.
Trains travel between 35 and 79 mph through the crossings, officials said. The most costly state requirement would be the installation of gates going across the entire road, preventing vehicles from going around them at the crossing. Ogden Dunes now has the traditional gates that extend about halfway across the crossing.
“A motorist can disregard and drive around them,” he said. “They have to make it so they can’t drive around them.”
Among the other requirements are the altering of traffic signal timing, which would allow any traffic caught on the tracks to move before a train arrived. It also would change the existing audible bell, making it sound the entire time the signals are activated to provide additional pedestrian warning.
“It is really a question of balancing safety with the cost of the mitigation requirements,” Scime said.
Two other northern Indiana communities backed off their planned horn bans after they received similar safety-improvement orders.
Syracuse repealed its whistle ban ordinance, and Goshen withdrew its petition to state officials to await the approval of new federal railroad guidelines.
However, Clouser said Ogden Dunes officials have not given up investigating ways to silence the train horns. He is awaiting an Illinois study in which automated horns sound, but the noise is directed along the tracks and not into residential areas.
“I thought that would be the cheapest and most effective way,” he said.