Here are couple of questions about train noises and operations:
I live in the Lincoln neighborhood. I thought the train horns would disappear when the 39th Street bridge was completed. But no: One of the engineers really likes to blow his horn very early in the morning. Sometimes it wakes us up at 3 a.m., sometimes it’s at 5:30 a.m. The horn blowing seems to last for over a minute. It’s a bit ridiculous. What’s up with that?
— Andrea
Gus Melonas, spokesman for BNSF Railway, insists that train horn blasts are much fewer and farther between over on the west side of Vancouver at the newly expanded rail yard.
“There’s no comparison with how it used to be,” he said. Since there’s no longer a street crossing the tracks — 39th Street passes overhead now — trains no longer have to blow the legally required whistle pattern when approaching a crossing: two longs, a short and a long.
But that doesn’t mean those horns have blasted their last. The area lost a crossing but added more tracks. More train traffic is coming through every day, and that means more train switching, more track inspections, more maintenance, more people, more activity overall. And that means more need for warnings that can’t be ignored.
“It’s a major rail yard,” Melonas said, that easily sees more than 100 different train movements over the course of a typical day. Each of these requires warning blasts as trains stop and start.
“With all of the different craft activity, there will be warning blasts around the clock for safety,” he said. Those blasts are mandatory, Melonas said, but they’re also flexible in terms of how long the engineer must lean on the horn.
“There’s no specific longevity to those blasts,” he said, adding that the railway and its engineers are well aware of trying not to wake the neighbors.
I go to the drive-through wildlife refuge in Ridgefield often. I was on my way in, but when I got to the train crossing, a train was stopped. Cars were stuck on the other side and there were about four cars waiting to get in. There was a Ridgefield policeman on scene, who told me the wait should be 15 minutes. It was actually about 30 minutes or more before the train left. I think they had a shift change. A Suburban came and dropped off two guys and picked up the two guys who were on the train. One of the two guys leaving had his lunch box. A guy behind me stated that trains can get fined big for blocking intersections. Can they?
-Glenn Batson
Maybe some can — but not in Ridgefield.
“We don’t have any ordinance or any way to do anything like that,” said a staffer in the city manager’s office. Same goes for the city of Vancouver, by the way, according to assistant city attorney Brent Boger.
Spokesman Gus Melonas said BNSF has been known to get hit with what are essentially local traffic tickets, but he didn’t get specific. Little dings don’t have much effect on this nationwide rail network, he said.
“We’re certainly aware of public access, and we try never to block crossings for more than 10 minutes at a time,” he said. “That’s our standard.”
You’re right, Glenn, that what you saw was a shift change. That’s because train crews are legally prohibited from continuing to work after 12 hours. “They cannot operate after 12 hours,” Melonas said. Sometimes that means they have to be picked up from a stopped train and transported back to base — and a fresh crew rotated on.
Melonas said he wasn’t aware of the half-hour stop in Ridgefield. “It isn’t our practice to do that,” he said. He said BNSF is looking into it.
“We can exceed 60 trains daily through this area at Ridgefield,” he said. “This includes BNSF freight trains, local trains, Union Pacific Railroad freight trains and Amtrak.”
