Homeowners are still suffering noise pollution along the NJ Transit RiverLINE. The problem is the FRA’s insane horn blaring rule:
On weekdays, 91 River Line trains sweep north and south between Camden and Trenton, starting about 5:45 a.m. and ending about 10 p.m., when the commuter trains make their final runs.
But peace does not descend on these river towns, even then.
In Pennsauken, Palmyra, Cinnaminson, Delran, Riverside, Delanco, Edgewater Park, and Bordentown, residents living close to the tracks are shaking fists at an unknown Conrail engineer whose long, loud horn-blasts in the wee hours sound “hostile,” they say, and even “spiteful.”
It should be a policy goal to encourage people to live near train stations, not drive them away:
“You can’t have a conversation” when the horns sound, said the wife, who gave her name as Nancy. “And that guy on the freight train is so obnoxious,” she added.
She pointed to a vacant two-story white clapboard house across Woodlane Road, adjacent to the grade crossing. The owner, a widow, “just walked away from it” several years ago, she said, because she couldn’t sell it.
“What good is a house,” she asked, “if you can’t enjoy it?”
Loud enough to alert people to not get run over by trains.
And it alerts people 1/2 a mile away to boot! Why not make the horns even louder, so people 1 mile away don’t get run over too? Obviously louder = safer.
Nobody’s arguing that trains shouldn’t have horns. But obnoxiously loud horns that have to be sounded almost continuously through residential neighborhoods where all the intersections are already equipped with gates and flashing lights and loud bells? It’s just not necessary. No one should be surprised when the train arrives around here.
Our local Caltrain system accidentally kills maybe a couple people per year. Compared to traffic fatalities, this is a non issue.
Regardless of the merits of the offense, this “problem” has been ongoing for decades, indeed a century or more, and predates any linkage to NJ Transit. And in many cases, it transcends “caveat emptor” with an even bigger factor: The trains were there first. Finally, it’s interesting that residents along the line don’t complain about car and bus and truck noise on the parallel roadway. Can’t kick the FRA in the face for that, I suppose.
It is a common misconception that this problem goes back hundreds of years. The FRA horn-rule only went into effect in the 1990’s. Prior to that, States and localities had control over horn regulations.
The FRA rule also caused the train operators to lawyer-up. They made the horns louder, and installed event-recorders to make sure the horn was being activated. Before the FRA rule, there were un-written policies that engineers would not blast horns when passing through residential neighborhoods at 3am.
In any case, NJ Transit has a passenger rail service there now, and in order for people to use it, they need to live near the tracks. Even if the freight trains came first, that is no reason to continue blasting horns.
Easier to complain than do the hard work to get a quiet zone: http://www.njtpa.org/Planning/Regional-Studies/Freight/Quiet-Zone-Designation-in-New-Jersey-An-Informatio.aspx
The problem is that building Quiet Zones can be prohibitively expensive for a community.
Ridiculous. Four-quadrant gates — which are all that are needed to make a quiet zone — are cheap, relatively speaking, and any community can afford them. At least for ordinary one-lane-each-way roads.
In the rare situations where four-quadrant gates cannot practically be installed… those situations involve roadway/railway layouts that are actually kind of dangerous.
I guess four-quadrant gates are more expensive if you have very wide roads, but in that case *your community has a different problem*…
Blame the victim.
I think it is important to keep some perspective.
More stringent horn blasting rules came around 25 years ago when a string of crashed on grade crossings made it into TV, people got angry, and politicians decided to pressure FRA to “do something” about it. Some lawsuits were filled to actually force the railways to do this, so before a whole bigger mess was created, FRA just put a clear rule about it, ending ambiguity and inconsistent use of horns.
On today’s political climate, what public official would dare to ask “do you want less noise in exchange for a couple accidental deaths every decade”?