JACKSONVILLE — A Florida woman says a railroad crossing arm malfunction put her in the path of a Florida East Coast Railway locomotive Dec. 11, and only the watchfulness of a passenger allowed her to back up before the arms came back down, the Florida Times-Union reports.
But FEC officials say their tests hours after the incident show the crossing arm didn’t malfunction.
Realtor Carole Traynham said she was eastbound on Greenland Road with a colleague at 10 a.m. when she came upon the railroad crossing. They stopped behind a few other cars because the lights were flashing and the crossing arms were coming down.
After a few minutes and no train, she said the crossing arms went up and she followed the other cars across the tracks. That is when her passenger saw something rumbling up the tracks near them.
“The crossing arms on both sides went up,” Traynham said. “We proceeded across and my companion said, ‘There is a train coming,’ and I started to reverse. As I did, the arms came down again.
“I managed to get back far enough so that the arm came down on the hood and missed it by a quarter of an inch. The fact that could happen to anyone is scary. Had my companion not been there, I might not have seen the train.”
Traynham said she remembers the crossing arm’s warning bells had stopped when she got to the rails. Her passenger, Angela Seymour, said the lights also were off when they started through.
“That train wasn’t that far from us when the crossing arms were up,” she said. “They were still up when we went through, and I said ‘There is a train coming.’ At least a few cars had gone through before we went through.”
Traynham said she immediately called the railroad and reported the problem. FEC spokesman Brian Nicholson said the railroad sent a team to the site. But a check of the crossing arms and a computer that tracks how and when they deploy showed it was “operating fine.”
“We downloaded information from the signal systems and found that the equipment was working properly,” he said.
Nicholson said it is possible the computer system might not have tracked a glitch, and that “anything is possible anywhere.” But he reminded drivers that they are “not supposed to move until the flashing lights have completely stopped” for safety reasons.
Because there was no accident, Nicholson said no outside agency will investigate the woman’s report.