(The following story by David DeWitte appeared on The Gazette website on February 28.)
CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa — Railroad crossing signals and gate arms will be installed at a rural crossing north of Cedar Rapids where a 17-year-old Cedar Rapids driver was injured after a collision with a train last month.
The project was awarded $140,000 in federal funding this week by the Iowa Department of Transportation, one of 26 railroad safety projects in the state for which funding was announced this week.
The crossing of the Chicago Central line is on the C Avenue extension north of County Home Road. It currently has a crossbuck warning sign.
In the January accident, a 17-year-old female motorist who didn’t stop at the crossing was hit by a three-engine Chicago Central & Pacific train that crashed into her car’s passenger side. She survived injuries from the accident, which was reported by the train’s conductor.
The project was rated higher than all except 10 of the 26 projects approved by the DOT.
DOT officials approved eight other Chicago Central railroad crossing projects, including signals with gate arms on 300th Avenue in Delwaware County.
The DOT also announced it has completed its first installation of a new style of crossing system designed to prevent motorists from driving around crossing arms in Ames.
The Union Pacific Railroad crossing on Duff Avenue was updated with four “quadrant” gates and a in-pavement loop detection system that prevents vehicles from becoming trapped inside the four gates. If the detection system senses a vehicle on the roadway within the gates, it delays closing the exit gate.
Jim Gibson of the DOT’s rail transportation office said the City of Ames previously used a video camera to attempt to prosecute motorists who drove around the previous two-gate system.
Peterson said a typical solution to the problem would have been to install a raised concrete median between the northbound and southbound lanes. At the Duff Avenue location, the road right of way was not wide enough to allow the construction of a raised median without costly land acquisition.
The intersection is one of the most studied crossings in Iowa because of the high volumes of traffic, including 14,500 vehicles on the raod and 66 trains per day. It has been the site of 18 crashes since 1978.
The DOT is now planning to use the same kind of system on a Highway 17 railroad crossing in Boone County.