Silence at last!!!

All I can say is; It's about freaken time!!!!

Trains ordered to silence horns
BY JAMES GELUSO, Californian staff writer e-mail: jgeluso@bakersfield.com Wednesday, Feb 20 2008 11:16 PM
Last Updated: Thursday, Feb 21 2008 7:41 AM
Locals are rejoicing at news peace and quiet will soon return to downtown and east Bakersfield — but it may not last forever.


The Federal Railroad Administration recently ordered BNSF Railway to stop blowing train horns in the area by March 3.
It’s a victory for residents who’ve been fighting train noise for 21⁄2 years and heard from city officials last summer that the horns were here to stay.
“We tackled the problem and we won,” said Dean Gardner, who pestered the city about the issue.
Gardner had dug up a page of a BNSF manual instructing engineers not to sound the horns in downtown Bakersfield. It was key evidence of a quiet zone in effect before 2005.
The feds’ edict was welcome news to Saint Dominguez, vice-president at Oasis Air Conditioning on East Truxtun Avenue.
A driver can’t talk to a forklift operator when the horns blow, especially if the engineer chooses to do one sustained blast instead of shorter blasts for each crossing.
“Basically, when the train comes by, we have to stop everything,” he said.
But City Attorney Ginny Gennaro warned the battle isn’t over. And it’s not a return to the pre-2005 good old days, she said.
The federal edict created a temporary quiet zone from the crossing at L Street to the crossing at Sumner and Miller streets. It will last only if the city makes safety improvements to the intersections. Horns are already quiet to the west of the area because streets go over or under the tracks, not across them.
The state Public Utilities Commission is studying the crossings and will recommend what the city must do. The city will then hire a consultant to determine the costs, said Raul Rojas, city public works director.
It could include closing some streets and installing new circuitry that activates crossing guards earlier if the trains are moving fast, said Gardner.
If the city decides the cost is too high, the trains will have to start blowing their horns again, Rojas said. He said he has no idea what that cost is going to be.
And that’s why Gennaro cautions against people getting too excited.
“While it is good news, it is by no means the end of the story,” she said.
She’s also worried that the city is exposing itself to liability if there is an accident in the quiet zone.
In November, the city asked the Federal Railroad Administration to restore its quiet zone while it finished the study. The railroad objected, claiming that the quiet zone had lapsed 21⁄2 years ago, so it was too late.
But the federal government said the regulations allow cities to file for quiet zones at any time.
Gardner was pleased his and others’ work paid off, although he wished it happened sooner.
“Frankly, if these train horns were in Seven Oaks, these train horns would have been solved years ago,” he said.