The silence of the trains — for real

For the first time in more than a century, trains now will go through the Route 66 town of Flagstaff, Ariz., without sounding their warning horns, reported the Arizona Daily Sun.

On Tuesday, trains went through Flagstaff for the first time without blasting their horns. It took several years and hundreds of thousands of dollars, but many residents and overnight guests in the city’s motels now will get a more restful sleep.

Mayor Sara Presler picked up one of the small wooden train whistles given to community leaders to commemorate the silencing of train horns at all five city crossings, only to learn in front of a crowd of more than 100 people that the toy didn’t work.

Presler would later joke that she must have gotten the “quiet zone” train whistle.

An op-ed piece in the Sun today elaborated on the problems with train horns:

But traditions die hard, and it’s taken several decades longer for civic leaders to get over the nostalgia and apply cold, hard logic to the problem.

That calculation has to start with the acknowledgment that trains and their horns aren’t what they used to be. What was once a whistle announcing the arrival of passengers, mail or freight some 30 times a day is now a series of electronically amplified blasts of 110 decibels apiece at each of five crossings. Multiply that by up to 120 trains a day when the economy is good, and, on average, train horns are going off in Flagstaff in multiple bursts along the Route 66 corridor once every 12 minutes — 24/7.

A few train buffs complained, but they’re in a small minority. And one resident argued that only three-fifths of Flagstaff was an actual “quiet zone” because of 78-decibel wayside horns at railroad crossings on the city’s east side.

And I predict the town of Kingman, Ariz., will eventually implement a railroad quiet zone in their town. The complaints against trains are too numerous to ignore.