Comment by closeparen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by closeparen | Hacker News Reader

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Ever lived near a busy level crossing? Passing trains may simply make the floors shake; train horns are deafening. You don't just hear them, you feel them in the core of your body. If you building is not well soundproofed, or you have any windows open for ventilation, you have no hope of sleeping through the night. Passing airplanes are background noise, passing trains refuse to be ignored.

Long/slow trains create an impermeable partition in the area, causing huge disruptions to local transportation (even pedestrians). Train tracks are also dangerous, requiring extra supervision of children and claiming the lives of the suicidal/oblivious/reckless every now and then.

If I asked to build something which

- Makes a huge amount of noise as it passes through residential areas at night.

- Disrupts all pedestrian, bicycle, and automobile traffic while it passes.

- Has no hope of stopping for the hazards that can trivially enter its path.

- Will obliterate anything it hits, 100% of the time.

You'd look at me like I was crazy, unless you grew up viewing trains as just part of the landscape.

All the same, I think we should build more of them. But trains are much worse for externalizing costs than airplanes.

Most of these points don't apply as much to purpose-build high-speed passenger rail lines (which is part of why they are so expensive: you don't just throw a level crossing through a street, they require extensive building to isolate them to mitigate these things, and if you already have a street grid that isn't prepared for it everything gets even more complicated)

I've lived less than 50 m from one for quite a while, and cars on the road inbetween were worse than passing high-speed trains. Freight trains or old, slow trains were another thing.

Should be noted all your points are also true about airplanes, except the transport disruption. Having lived near an airport they are EXTREMELY loud and take up a truely titanic amount of space.

All those problems are solved by grade separation. If railways are fully grade separated there is no need for trains to use their horns. Since rail needs shallower gradients than road it often makes sense to sink it below street level, drainage allowing.

I have a train line ca. 1km away where the ICE high-speed train from Hamburg to Berlin passes. It's not driving there with full speed though. The train is basically not to notice. Though I hear the freight-trains or sometime the local trains (S-Bahn). Of course the ICE train is very silent and sure uses no horns - why should it - there are no level crossings. The tracks are placed higher and crossings are under bridges. The track is just next to other tracks for local trains, which then also have no level crossings inside the city.

What disturbs me slightly more are the planes.

Why are trains required to blow their horns? This is what guarded crossings are for.

I my country, trains are required to travel at lover speed at night time near to a town or city. Horn is forbidden at night too.

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