Mayor wants to stop train whistles

Mayor Don Barnhart says it’s time to do something about noisy train whistles in Columbia Falls, and he’s willing to shut down one of Columbia Fall’s two at-grade railroad track crossings to quiet down passing trains.

There are more trains passing through now than 20 years ago, Barnhart said, and he expects there will be plenty more in the coming years.

Federal law requires BNSF Railroad engineers to blow their whistles at a specified volume and length of time when their trains approach an at-grade crossing. There are two at-grade crossings on the BNSF line in Columbia Falls, at Fourth Avenue East and Second Avenue West.

Barnhart noted that city officials have talked to BNSF about the issue in the past. High costs and the additional tracks at Fourth Avenue posed difficulties, he said, but eliminating the Fourth Avenue crossing could bring the project back in line.

“The Fourth Avenue crossing was needed for the industrial park,” he told the Columbia Falls City Council on July 16. “But there’s no industrial park there now.”

Quiet zones can be implemented for at-grade crossings if signaling equipment and crossing arms are in place, and break-away channelization devices are installed along the centerline of the roadway for about 100 feet in either direction from the track. The idea is to prevent a vehicle from driving around a crossing arm.

The city of Whitefish implemented quiet zones at its Second Street and State Park Road crossings, where signaling equipment and crossing arms were already in place. The initial estimate for the cost of installing channelization devices at each crossing was $15,000, but the final cost was closer to $10,000.

Making Whitefish’s third at-grade crossing, at Birch Point Drive, a quiet zone came up before the city council there several times. The cost to Whitefish of installing the signaling equipment and crossing arms was estimated in 2007 to cost about $160,000.

City manager Susan Nicosia noted that her father, a former Amtrak engineer, said he commonly blew the whistle when he saw people walking close to the tracks in Columbia Falls as his train passed.

Councilor Mike Shepard said he’d been told BNSF engineers on westbound trains begin to sound their whistles at the Con Kelly siding near CFAC to scare wildlife away from the tracks.