(The Associated Press circulated the following story on October 15.)
SPRINGFIELD, Ohio — The wail of passing trains’ whistles is not music to the ears of hotel keepers or library patrons in this western Ohio city.
To deflect the din, Springfield officials want to replace train whistles with automated sirens posted at railroad crossings.
The city is one of several Ohio communities interested in experimenting with the new technology.
To prevent wrecks with vehicles, train engineers are required to sound their whistles for at least a quarter-mile as they approach a crossing and keep sounding them at a minimum decibel level until they reach the crossing. That means every business and resident along the way gets an earful.
“It could be 2 or 3 in the morning, and when those decibels go off it tends to wake our guests,” Greg Zemore, general manager of the Springfield Inn, said yesterday. “The next morning, we get the complaints.”
The train whistles also disturb readers and interrupt staff meetings at the downtown library.
“The library is a quiet place for reading and studying,” said the library director, John McConnagha. “When a library is next to a train track, it’s going to be loud.”
The automated sirens would play a recording of a train whistle from speakers mounted on poles at the crossings, directing the sound toward the traffic. They would be activated when the approaching train sets off the gates and warning lights at the crossings.
“It focuses the train-whistle sound where it’s needed, which is on the street,” said City Engineer Tim Gothard. “It is something everyone’s interested in.”
The Northwestern University Center for Public Safety, which evaluated the roadside horns at crossings in a Chicago suburb, found that overall horn noise declined by 80 percent in the surrounding area.
Within a year, the Ohio Rail Development Commission plans to begin testing the stationary horns at three crossings in Lake Township near Toledo. The Columbus suburb of Worthington and two Cincinnati suburbs also have expressed interest in the horns.
Susan Kirkland, the commission’s manager of safety programs, said that for now the stationary horns will be used as supplemental safety devices.
She said the railroads likely will not agree to stop sounding whistles unless federal regulations are changed authorizing communities to create quiet zones around the tracks.
The federal change could not happen until at least December 2004 because of the regulatory process, she said.