Hacker News Reader

Comment by briandw | Hacker News Reader

I love the new trains. Now if we could get them to lower the db of the horn. They blast at a minimum of 96 db. It's pointless and a big quality of life issue.

https://communities.springernature.com/posts/train-horns-sav...

https://railroads.dot.gov/sites/fra.dot.gov/files/2019-11/FR...

View on HN

they changed this in southern california for the surfliner and it was a huge impact. really nice to not hear the train horn. then they added speakers that play fake train sounds at grade crossings… why

It's a federal requirement. The real solution would be not to have grade crossings, but America is generally incapable of building anything.

One of the few good things to come out of the next four years is that California will be able to basically ignore any federal requirements that serve no real purpose.

thankfully california has more than enough supply of those. cities like san francisco have proven reserves that will last decades on their own

They're not going to ignore the railroad regulators.

(Also, Congress is going to flip in two years. The only constant in US politics is that voters get bored of whoever's in power and vote against them in the midterms.)

The requirement is a bit garbage. Most other countries manage to run their rail networks effectively without having their trains blast the horn at every crossing. When they do, it's typically two short tones, not the way the US does it.

> America is generally incapable of building anything.

I mean, sure. But this very article is about having built (erected?) electricity poles for those trains to run on.

It got delayed like three years because the tiny billionaire suburb Atherton filed a fake environmental protection lawsuit against it.

Reno put their downtown train track underground. It’s a short segment but it’s doable.

Emeryville has no horn train crossings. It’s doable.

I see people take photos on the train tracks all the time and trains are pretty silent.

There would be a lot more dead.

Making horns non-mandatory at crossings wouldn’t prevent the engineer from using it when appropriate.

Here's over an hour of recordings of level crossings (railroad crossings) in the UK.

I've obviously only watched a couple of minutes, but there are no train horns. There's a mixture of urban and rural locations.

https://youtu.be/9FoeIxfYW20?t=122&feature=shared

For pedestrian crossings at least, I did a long distance walk in England where there was signage at a couple crossings to the effect of look, listen, and be aware.

On other walks, there was a phone you were supposed to use (I did) to call an operations center to get a go ahead to cross.

Other countries have changed laws requiring all crossings be gated and or have signalling. The cheap solution is to blow the horn.

Switzerland took 20 years to update most of its 4440 train crossings to meet federal requirements. 97% meet this standard as of today. The reason for the upgrade was not to reduce the annoyance of horns but to save lives which it does.

All road crossings along the Caltrain route have both gates and signals. I think all pedestrian ones do too now (they have largely blocked off the at-grade ones).

At Del Mar crossing because you can’t see or hear anything from behind the curve. Clever solve.

Why would a train blow its horn unless there is a chance of impact?

Trains in Switzerland also have very loud horns and if they are inside the train station this can be extremely loud. However you will only ever hear them when for example some fool jumps the tracks or something that can be live threatening.

On construction sites generally they use a separate signaling System that isn't as loud but loud enough for the workers to hear. That is also temporary.

In Denmark, they are regularly used to warn at "unmanned" level crossings, i.e. where there are no warning bells, lights or barrier. And only if they are outside of towns. There are very few of these level crossings left in Denmark, and they are usually only for pedestrian paths, like say when the train travels through a forest, and the forest path crosses the tracks.

In my regular commute, which includes a local train and a regional train, there are two instances (exclusively on the local train's singular track). The regional trains I use have no level crossings on their tracks (all bridges and tunnels).

I lived in Menlo Park about .75 miles from the rails and I’d get woken up still. It’s so unbelievably dumb and annoying

Here in Marin County, we got an exemption from the federal regulation, and our Sonoma-Marin Area Rail Transit almost never blows its horn -- at least on the part of the line south of central San Rafael.

Of course Marin got an exception.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com