(The following story by William J. Brotherton appeared on the Star-Telegram website on October 30. William J. Brotherton of Argyle is an attorney and a former Burlington Northern Railroad brakeman, conductor and trainmaster. He is the author of Burlington Northern Adventures: Railroading In the Days of the Caboose.)
FORT WORTH, Texas — “Quiet zones” along railroad tracks can be killers. Sadly, that was illustrated last week with the death of 5-year-old Kevin Bradford of Watauga in a tragic accident.
Reports said that the Union Pacific freight train that struck Kevin had just left a quiet zone before its crew encountered Kevin, his brother and a cousin on the tracks. That means the boys never heard a train horn until it was too late, because freight trains can take a mile or more to stop, depending upon the number of cars and the speed of the train.
I should know. I’m a former railroad brakeman, conductor and trainmaster, and was in the cab of a locomotive on several occasions when we struck automobiles. Fortunately, no one was ever hurt, because each time that we hit a car, we were going very slowly, had very few cars attached to the locomotive or both.
Since the advent of railroading, engineers have been required to sound warnings at crossings — first with a steam whistle and later with a diesel horn. Specifically, the law requires two long blasts of the horn, one short one and then another long blast through the crossing. It’s very noisy, obviously, but necessary, given that trains can kill you.
When I was railroading in the Midwest, an engineer decided to implement his own quiet zone in northern Minnesota. At 2 a.m., he was passing through an area with isolated farms and a multitude of rural crossings. He decided not to blow his horn as a courtesy.
Bad mistake. His train struck a car, killing two people. The engineer went to jail.
Quiet zones were first authorized in 1994, but federal regulations for them were not approved until 10 years later.
More and more cities are implementing them — after all, who likes to wake up in the middle of the night to the sound of a long, wailing train horn? Never mind that the railroad tracks were there long before houses and businesses were built nearby.
When I was a child growing up in Atlanta, my friends and I frequently walked the tracks of the Seaboard Airline Railroad. We liked watching the trains, waving to the conductor in the caboose and dreaming about all the faraway places that the glistening passenger trains could take us.
One day, though, we got caught in the middle of a single-track trestle, and the Silver Comet, a crack passenger train, came roaring around a curve at 90 mph. By the time it crossed over the trestle, we had jumped into murky Peachtree Creek.
What saved us was that the passenger train had blown at a crossing shortly before it got to us. We had a warning that a train was coming, and we didn’t hesitate to jump.
If there had been a quiet zone, we would’ve been killed. As it was, we only got muddy. (And if there were water moccasins in the creek, we scared them away with our whooping and hollering as we made the leap.)
No one should be out on railroad tracks without a legitimate reason. But people — especially children — break rules. And if quiet zones continue to proliferate, we’re going to have a lot more injuries and deaths because those train horns were never heard.