Earlier this year, the city of Kingman, Ariz., looked into the possibility of a railroad quiet zone to keep trains from sounding their horns when passing through town.
The City Council demurred and asked to see whether a similar quiet-zone program in Flagstaff is working.
According to a report in the Kingman Daily Miner, the verdict is in:
[…T]he Flagstaff program is being hailed as a smashing success by Vice Mayor Robin Gordon, who recently visited the city for a meeting of the Arizona Historic Route 66 Association.
After the meeting, Gordon met with Matt Capalby, the former director for the Department of Environmental Quality’s Northern Arizona region. She said the two had elected to have their conversation by Flagstaff’s Chamber of Commerce, which lies right next to the Burlington Northern Santa Fe railroad tracks.
“We were there for probably an hour and we observed numerous trains going by the crossing on Beaver Street,” Gordon said. “How to describe it would be, in Kingman, if you’re at the Powerhouse and trying to have a conversation with somebody, when the train blows its whistle, you have to stop talking until it passes. The thing in Flagstaff I noticed was, we didn’t have to stop the conversation.”
It cost Flagstaff $885,000 to implement a railroad quiet zone. It’ll probably cost less for Kingman because of the fewer railroad tracks in town. Gordon says she’s identified a funding source through a recent raise in the bed tax from 2 percent to 4 percent.
The Kingman council will take up the proposal soon. Fully implementing the plan would take two or three years, which Gordon says should be enough time to raise the money.
It seems certain that Kingman’s motel owners will whole-heartedly endorse the idea. Overnight lodgers have long complained about train horns disrupting their sleep. In fact, the former owners of the now-closed Hotel Brunswick offered guests earplugs to help them get through the night.
Flagstaff’s quiet zone isn’t really all that quiet. Instead of hearing the actual railroad whistle sounds at each grade crossing the city installed speakers which play an “electronic” train whistle sound each time a train passes by. No less noisy – just different and without the nuances that a human can give to the sounding of a train whistle.
Safety is of the first importance when dealing with rail roads and their equipment. No exceptions.