(The following article by Chuck McGinness was posted on the Palm Beach Post website on February 4.)
PALM BEACH, Fla. — The ear-piercing horn blasts from passenger and freight trains moving past residential neighborhoods on the rail line that parallels Interstate 95 may begin to fade away in a few months.
A new federal regulation to create quiet zones at rail crossings where upgraded safety equipment has been installed should take effect around May 1, a Federal Railroad Administration spokesman said Thursday.
Tom Drake, the agency’s regional safety manager, met with about 75 local officials to outline what they need to do to enact the whistle ban.
The South Florida Regional Transportation Authority is spending more than $35 million in federal grants to build full-closure gates and high median curbs that prevent drivers from entering more than 70 crossings when trains are approaching. Now, the onus is on cities to submit the paperwork to the FRA to create the quiet zones along the CSX Transportation corridor.
The federal review process will take at least four months, so it will likely be September at the earliest before trains stop blowing their whistles, Drake said.
“It’s going to be real easy on our line,” said Dan Mazza, Tri-Rail’s engineering director.
On South Florida’s other rail corridor, the Florida East Coast railway, it will be much longer before downtown residents hear the sounds of silence.
No FEC crossing has the safety equipment to qualify as a quiet zone, but the company is willing to work with cities to make the improvements, spokesman Husein Cumber said.
In other words, cities will have to pay the costs. Four-quadrant gates at one crossing cost about $300,000.
“We feel train horns are a proven safety device,” Cumber said.
Twenty years ago, homeowners living near the FEC tracks got a taste of what life is like without train horns.
Florida lawmakers agreed to let cities establish a nighttime horn ban. But the FRA issued an emergency order canceling the state law after a study showed nighttime accidents nearly tripled at crossings where trains did not sound warning whistles.
In 1994, Congress mandated that the FRA come up with uniform standards on train horns for the more than 200 communities around the country that instituted whistle bans. The new rule was supposed to begin in December 2004, but was postponed for a few months to review 3,000 comments that the FRA received on the measure.
What will happen if there’s an upsurge in wrecks at crossings in safety zones? The FRA hasn’t really considered the possibility, Drake said.
“We don’t expect quiet zones are going to cause an increase (in crashes),” he said. “I’m not saying it won’t happen.”