(The following article by Tina Shah was posted on the Arizona Republic website on June 23. Brother Tom Fooshee is a member of BLET Division 123 in Phoenix.)
PHOENIX, Ariz. — A federal regulation requiring trains to blow their whistles at every road crossing is expected to take effect this week, but Tempe officials say they are preparing to make the city a train “quiet zone.”
Glenn Kephart, public works manager with Tempe, said the city would submit an application for the designation by month’s end to the Federal Railroad Administration.
The proposed regulation, the first time the federal government has regulated railroad whistles, is expected to take effect Friday.
It allows towns and cities to restrict whistle blowing to emergency cases and take steps ranging from adding railroad crossing arms to mounting cameras by the tracks. It was initiated by Congress in 1994. It has been delayed because of administrative procedures and research until now.
The Tempe quiet zone will be joint efforts of Union Pacific and Tempe and will be backed up by a $150,000 budget for safety measures, Kephart said. Ninety percent of the money will come from federal money, leaving Tempe to contribute $15,000.
Arizona requires train engineers to begin blowing train whistles a quarter of a mile before reaching every public railroad crossing and continuously blow the whistle until the whole train has passed the crossing.
But the new federal rule will override state and local regulations.
That comes as good news for some residents fed up with train noise.
“Eighty percent of the train whistles are tolerable, but the other 20 percent continue blowing their whistles all the way through Tempe,” said Lloyd Williams, 85.
Williams has heard many train whistles in his life, but he said they have never been as long lasting and loud as they have been in the last 10 years.
He recalls an incident when an engineer coming into Tempe from Mesa began sounding the whistle 250 feet before the railroad crossing with four loud whistles while going 5 mph. Then he blew 14 whistles in a row, with the last two continuing after the train had completely passed the crossing, Williams said.
Tom Fooshee, a union officer for the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen, understands how the train horns can be bothersome to local residents.
“When the speed limit is real slow, the train horns can bother the heck out of people, even when it is not necessary,” said Fooshee, a train engineer with Union Pacific for 32 years.
Other municipalities in the southeast Valley are holding back on addressing the issue.
Gilbert officials are not going to worry about allocating money for possible safety measures until they see the regulation is put into effect.
George Pettit, town manager for Gilbert, said it is “presumptive” to think this proposed regulation is going to pass in June because it has been an ongoing process since 1994.
Once it is law, there will be research done by the town to see what safety measures are needed, and money would come from general town operational funds, Pettit said.
The railroad administration has an online tool called the quiet zone calculator that allows each town or city to plug in information about a specific public crossing to assess the risk of collision, Warren Flatau, a public affairs specialist for the railroad administration, said.
If the risk is above the national average, the town will have to mitigate the risk of not having train whistle warnings by considering more safety measures such as crossings being closed at night or roadblocks to not allow cars to drive over tracks when the railroad crossing bars are down, or even cameras by the tracks in order to photograph trespassers, Flatau said.
Violators could face fines up to $7,500, Flatau said.