(The following article by Kathleen Burge was posted on the Boston Globe website on December 14.)
BOSTON — In more than two dozen cities and towns hugging the railroad tracks that snake outward from Boston, the train whistle is a ghost of the past.
No one can remember a time when the whistles blew as trains zipped through railroad crossings in these communities, many clustered on the North Shore. But a deadly accident and lost records from decades ago may jeopardize the quiet. State officials, weighing serenity versus public safety, are reviewing 29 communities where no records can be found authorizing the original whistle bans.
As soon as this week, the Federal Railroad Administration also expects to release new rules on train whistles, nine contentious years after the agency began writing new guidelines. For some who live along the quieter stretches of railroad tracks, the possible return of the whistles is annoying.
”I’ve always thought that blowing a whistle is kind of an archaic, caveman approach,” said David Neill, a former selectman who lives near the commuter rail line in Hamilton, a town with a now-questionable whistle ban. ”The way we make railroad crossings safe is to make as much noise as you can and hope you can scare people away.”
Although much has changed since the golden age of the railroad, this has not: the bitter debate over train whistles. In 1873, a Brookline man offered a $10,000 reward to anyone who invented a less disruptive alternative to the railroad horn. No one did.
Boston’s ban on train whistles within city limits dates to 1875, when the state’s Railroad Commissioners heard from hundreds of sleep-deprived residents. In some neighborhoods, trains passed as often as every three minutes.
The commissioners mused that it was remarkable that the incessant whistles had been tolerated for so long. In some crowded neighborhoods, the commissioners wrote in their report, the whistles had become ”practically unendurable.”
They urged the railroad companies to stop blowing whistles ”within the limits of the city of Boston and other crowded neighborhoods,” except in emergencies. State officials suspect that some of the undocumented whistle bans in communities outside the city may date to that report, which doesn’t name specific suburbs.
In the 29 cities and towns now under review, the state Department of Telecommunications and Energy cannot find proof of the original whistle bans, either from its records or those of the state Legislature. Telephone queries to those communities also didn’t turn up any official records.
”A lot of these are historical bans that have been in existence for many, many years,” said Timothy Shevlin, executive director of the DTE, which regulates railroad safety.
The DTE will examine each of the 107 separate railroad crossings at issue in 29 communities and ultimately decide whether whistle bans are warranted, said Brian F. Christy, director of the DTE’s transportation division. The Massachusetts Municipal Association has agreed to help those communities, which may have two dozen or more trains pass each day, go through the process.
Those who support train whistles argue that they protect public safety. Michael Mulhern, the general manager of the MBTA, argues that at most commuter rail crossings, whistles pose little discomfort to nearby residents. Many towns in Massachusetts have no whistle bans.
”I don’t think there is any safer practice on the railroads than blowing whistles,” he said. ”I feel strongly that we should be blowing whistles on all of our railroads, unless there is a hardship which is compelling enough to outweigh the safety concerns.”
Without records showing the origin of the old whistle bans, he said, it is impossible to know whether they were rightfully granted. ”Was it a wink and a nod between the agency and the municipality?” he asked.
According to the Federal Railroad Administration, there have been 54 accidents, causing five deaths, on railroad crossings in Massachusetts since January 2000. (The numbers don’t include accidents along the tracks at other locations.) Nationally, 357 people died last year at railroad crossings, according to the agency’s statistics.
The FRA often cites a 1990 study which found that nighttime accidents at Florida railroad crossings increased 300 percent after whistle bans were instituted.
But local supporters of whistle bans argue that the densely populated Northeast, where trains are more likely to carry commuters than corn ears, cannot be compared to Florida. Drivers are more inclined to dodge the warning gate and try to beat the train, they say, in places where they might otherwise wait a half-hour for a long freight train to pass by.
And they argue that trains already are adequately signaled. ”When you come to a crossing, you have a gate,” said Nancy Tavernier, a former Acton selectwoman who helped her town get a whistle ban from the Legislature. ”You have a flashing light. You have bells. What else do you need to know a train’s coming?”
When Acton held public hearings on whether to seek a whistle ban, she said, residents testified that they hadn’t slept through the night in years. When town officials measured the strength of the whistle blast, she said, it was 115 decibels.
All across the country, trains are required to blow their horns every time they approach a spot where the railroad tracks cross roads. In Massachusetts, cities and towns can seek exemptions from that rule in one of two ways: a direct appeal to the DTE, which rarely grants whistle bans, or a Town Meeting vote that would then require legislative approval.
The bans prevent trains from routinely blowing their whistles, but they can still sound them in an emergency.
The state review of whistle bans began after a fatal accident in North Andover last year. Two elderly women driving to their weekly bingo game were killed instantly when their Geo Prism crashed into an approaching train. The driver apparently became confused and turned her car onto the railroad tracks, breaking through the wooden railroad crossing gate.
The MBTA had been observing a whistle ban at the crossing. When state officials investigated, they found the ban dated to the days of a now-defunct freight line. The intersection, which is not in a residential area, has become more dangerous as both the number of daily trains running and cars crossing the tracks increased, Christy said.
”It didn’t make sense that they would continue to maintain a whistle ban,” he said. The state reversed the ban, and trains now whistle as they approach the crossing.
After the accident, the MBTA asked state officials to research all of the whistle bans it was observing in greater Boston. Among the 37 communities with whistle bans, the DTE could find no records for 29 communities.
Residents of Manchester-by-the-Sea who feared that the new federal guidelines would end the town’s whistle ban formed a group several years ago to keep their neighborhoods quiet: Halt Outrageous Railroad Noise, or HORN. The group filed a 400-page report with the FRA, asking the agency to affirm whistle bans in communities that already have them.
Neil Chayet, a member of the group and a lawyer, argues that the state should not now respond to the lost records by deciding anew whether communities should be able to keep their whistle bans.
”They should reaffirm this,” he said, ”and it should be done with a minimum of heartache.”