FYI, the train horn signal when approaching a grade crossing is long, long, short, long. Here’s an example.
There’s a grade crossing near my neighborhood. There are signal lights and arms, and the trains also use their horns. Trains do pass through during the night; some of them you can hear that the engineer is just barely pulling on the horn to squeak out the minimal required amount of sound to comply with the rules, but others seem like they are deliberately laying on as much horn as they think they can get away with. Never been a problem for my house (I only hear the trains if I’m already awake), but for the houses next to the track, dayum…
I was in a exactly the same situation for a few years. It rarely bothered me, but I often thought it really would have been a pain to live much closer to the tracks.
I also noticed the variation in the engineers’ signals. I imagine it might be possible to identify individual engineers by the “personality” of their signals, if they ran the same routes on a regular basis.
Agreed. I understood your point.
The OP was discussing what happens when the crossing gates fail to lower & the warning lights fail to flash for an approaching train. IOW, how fail-safe are they? The answer seems to be: “not very”.
The answer today is that the train operator may or may not know of a crossing signal malfunction until a few seconds before they arrive at the crossing. and generally not in time to stop the train. So in that instance a collision is very likely unless car traffic is nil. Said another way, every time a car driver approaches a railroad crossing that’s not signaling a train, they’re betting their life on that clear signal not being a malfunction. Sometimes the car speed vs. train speed vs. sightlines give the car driver a good opportunity to ensure the tracks are clear from some distance back. But often not, and especially in (sub-)urban areas where traffic density is greatest.
My point was simply that we could add another layer of safety by lowering the gates and notifying the engineer of success far enough back that the train could be stopped in the event of signal malfunction. But doing so would have too big an impact on traffic flow. Which is why it isn’t done.
It’s unfortunate that in the US there’s no indication the railroad crossing signals are functioning but not activated. In several countries there’s a flashing white or yellow light as part of the signal which shows crossing traffic that it’s powered up (though it doesn’t necessarily indicate if there’s a fault).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJcw56AONA4This would actually make more sense in the US because you’re supposed to treat dark signals as malfunctioning, and railroad crossings are the only exception, with HAWK pedestrian crossing signals a weird kludge to try to work within those rules.
Anyway, the train engineer does at least have some feedback. The controller cabinets or bungalows have white lights pointed up and down the tracks so the engineer can see that the system is powered up. Also, the crossing signals have a small port on either side of the housing, behind the backplate, that lets the engineer see that they’re flashing. They’re called peepholes, and you can see them on the signals facing away in this photo:
Those two vids are interesting to me mostly because the lights and gates come down far, far earlier than they do in US practice. Many (most?) Americans would long since have driven around the gates in the assumption the train was never coming.
An 18-wheeler with a spare attached?
The better thing to do is to place the car in gear (first or reverse) and crank the starter - you should be able to lurch the car off the tracks before the battery gives out.
But I guess maybe you can’t do that in an automatic :smack:
Thats ok if they can see a long way down the tracks in both directions (or only one if they really know for sure thats the direction of the train risk comes from. )
If they cannot see down the tracks, risk is reduced by going across at a higher speed… that way the vehicle is on the tracks for less time, and also has less chance of stopping on the tracks.
But yes these days the ‘approaching train detector’, and signals ,gates will be tested by the train network management computers,and report a failure …
eg if the train is detected exiting the crossing but no train was detected approaching, the detector on the approach side failed.
If there are battery backups, the battery might be dead when its needed.
There are ways to have to safer and safer signals… eg one light is run by detectors on one rail, and another light is run by detectors on the other rail. And then computer networks send the operational status to HQ and HQ can send out urgent maintenance requests when faults are detected.
It just seems to me that its possible a vandal can always work out a way to disable the detectors installed. Perhaps the damage was done so as to help the maintenance man who gets paid for the call out to fix it…
Even manuals these days won’t do it, thanks to a clutch pedal interlock.
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As it happens, the level crossing down the road from my house was out just last week. Obviously my jurisdiction is almost certainly not your jurisdiction, but there are probably similarities in best practise all over the world.
Rail authorities take boom gate safety very seriously here - there are lots of level crossings, lots of idiots, and we average a couple of level crossing incidents a month, a moderate number of them fatal. Authorities were clearly pulling out the stops to make the area safe, but there seemed to be a lot of human intervention necessary.
As soon as the gate went out (someone drove into it :smack: ) all trains on the line stopped. Definitely no crawling through at 5kph or anything like that. That was to give the police time to get there. Once the intersection was thoroughly blocked off, trains resumed, while the gate was fixed. No vehicles crossed the tracks at all until this was done - a couple of hours.
So I’d trust my local authorities not to let a known fault lie, and to know about it pretty quickly. And trains always, always toot. Nevertheless, I always look if I can. Because nothing’s infallible. I’m not aware that any of the steady trickle of crossing incidents has been due to a boom gate failure, but it didn’t take much googling to find a recent just-plain-failed-with-no-warning incident locally.
Yeah. The risk window is almost entirely from when the failure occurs until the failure is known to the railroad HQ. After that moment the mitigating response is very real-time.
The problem is the length of that risk window. For modern signal gear it may be a matter of a few seconds given real-time telemetry. And for ancient signal gear it may be minutes or hours until they get a 3rd-hand phone call about a train having crushed some car(s).