Train horns now providing wake-up service near Cambridge crossing

Yep...these things. Canal St. got them too so both crossings in the Wed Med pair could re-qualify as quiet.

Note that both High and Canal are also sporting the upgraded high-reflectivity crossing gates and jumbo-size LED flashers for the updated regs.

The MBTA nor Keolis have any choice nor do the train engineers. Blowing the horn is a federally required safety procedure that is laid down in concrete. If the city wants to get it re-designated they can go through the process. If the engineer fails to blow the horn as required by federal law, s/he can be cited, and can even loose his job. If there is an accident, s/he can also be brought up on serious federal charges and even be prosecuted as having contributed to the accident, loss of property, or loss of life.

So, no engineer is going to not blow the horn because it irritates some locals, and neither for some city councilor. The process is set out on how to accomplish this, and engineers are notified --in writing--. Until then, the horns blow.

In theory, they should be blowing "unprotected crossing." That si two long blasts approaching the crossing, followed by one short blast just before the crossing, and one long one as the train enters and passes through the crossing. You've all heard it in the movies and TV shows. Little did you know that there was a federal law that actually defines that.

No, it's not enough. The railroad only has jurisdiction over the lights/bells, the condition of the physical crossing surface, and the track circuits for timing the crossing. Road-side structures related to the grade crossing like pavement markings, advance warning signs and speed limit, sidewalks, curbs, and shoulder dimensions are responsibility of the road maintainer: MassHighway on state-control roads, or the towns on town-control roads. To qualify for a quiet zone the towns have to maintain the road-side approaches to a higher safety threshold than non-quiet crossings.

Those standards do toughen from time, and require re-qualifying for quiet zone status when certain triggers are met advancing to the most recent quiet zone standard. On the Fitchburg Line, that trigger for all of the crossing safety upgrades was the re-signaling of the line from Somerville to Ayer to increase the max speed limit from 59 MPH to 79 MPH and eliminate a bunch of slow zones. Most of the grade crossing protection on the line had to be re-timed for the new track speeds, and the act of re-timing them triggered an FRA regulation on the railroad side to replace most crossing gates with the latest/greatest generation of safety standards.

At Sherman St. specifically, trains running inbound on the approach to Porter can now go a couple MPH faster because of realignment of the nearest track signals to the west, and the outbound acceleration out of Porter now reflects the slightly higher zip the new generation of locomotives have over the old. While barely any practical difference at this particular crossing, it did require the gates to be re-timed which triggered the regs for replacing the crossing equipment with the latest/greatest railroad-side safety generation. You'll notice the flashers at Sherman now have 10-inch LED lights instead of the old 8-inch incandescents, more reflective gate striping, and new signal huts for enhanced battery backup when the power goes out.

There's a reciprocal trigger on the road side to upgrade the approach safety to latest quiet-crossing standards in order to maintain the crossing's standards. Quiet zones aren't grandfathered in perpetuity. The ones that have no induced changes on the railroad or road sides can stay static for decades because nothing is triggering a change, but the second any substantive touches happen both sides go under time limit to settle up the difference to latest quiet zone regs. This just happened up/down the Fitchburg Line with the speed increase, and just happened with West Medford because Green Line Extension prep work revamped the entire signal layout of the Lowell Line in Somerville-Medford. The towns are given a due grace period to settle up, and if they don't they lose their quiet zone status and default back to a mandatory horn blow.

Since these Fitchburg upgrades were 10 years in the making and the Sherman St. impacts spelled out 10 years ago, Cambridge does not have plausible deniability for not knowing this was coming. Belmont wasted no time getting Brighton St. quiet-crossing upgraded with enhanced signage, bike lane striping, and ordering an above-and-beyond set of overhead gantry flashers to re-up its quiet qualifications. Sherman's had zero changes on the road side, not even a brush-cutting along the narrow ADA-noncompliant sidewalk. And they should've known that something more was going to be required, because those new 3-story condos massed up against the tracks changed all the sightlines for the northbound approach to the crossing...and were greenlit for build by the city after the Fitchburg upgrades were funded and advanced to design-build by the state.

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I lived on the corner of Sherman @ Walden for 9 years until 2012 well within ear range and almost within sight range of that crossing. I knew as a neighbor way back then that this quiet zone re-qualifier was coming, and that the new abutting condos + non-ADA sidewalk + relatively meager approach signage wouldn't all be able to skate stet onto a new exemption without some new touches on the city's part. I'm not sure what their excuse is today, other than they had a brainfart and are now trying to pass it non-convincingly onto someone else.

Get a Works truck out there with a brushcutter and some touch-up road paint, fix that non-compliant sidewalk that requires stepping around a telephone pole to get a baby stroller through the crossing, and pay the going rate for some AASHTO-spec reflective warning signage. This isn't hard. If Belmont could do this 1 mile up the tracks years ago at a much more expensive heavy-traffic crossing without any impotent screaming, Cambridge can do it at a relatively minor one like Sherman.

The community does have the choice not to put up with train horns, if they pony up to install a half-decent crossing gate at this intersection

Incorrect. Establishment of the Sherman quiet crossing was a recommendation of the city-funded North Cambridge Railroad Safety Study of 1994, whose main byproduct was the grade separation of the Walden Apartments pedestrian crossing with an underpass, closure of a couple other ped and "unofficial" crossings, and installation of safety fencing around the ROW near parks/playgrounds/public housing.

Most of the actual construction from the study was done between 2000-02, so at absolute longest Sherman's only been a quiet crossing for 20 years...give or take 2 years in either direction. Before that it got the horn blow just like every other generic public crossing. I'm willing to bet an outright majority of the homeowners with knickers in a twist today about the expiration of the quiet zone were the same exact homeowners who attended the meetings 20 years ago where the rules about achieving and maintaining quiet zone status were explicitly read off to them.

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Their beef is with the city for not maintaining qualifications that were made as crystal-clear to them as they were to every other municipality that has ever been granted a quiet zone on a town-control road. It's not the state's or feds' fault that Cambridge leaders have no long-term memory, or forgot the 10 years of notice they'd been given that the Fitchburg Line Improvements Project would trigger re-qualifications of every quiet crossing from Somerville to Ayer (which no other town on the line seemed to have had any trouble anticipating).

And while the FRA horn regs are indeed very onerous (though one could argue an increasing--not decreasing--necessity until we can start rolling back distracted driving), that's 100% federal oversight. So screaming at the T or any state-level pol who can't do anything about it to begin with is a complete waste of time and energy. Call Capuano's, Warren's, and Markey's offices if you want a change in the blanket rules; they're the only ones in any position to introduce legislation that impacts the FRA. Capuano actually sits on the Transpo/Infrastructure committee and Railroads subcommittee in the House, and Markey the Transpo/Infrastructure subcommittee in the Senate...so they are theoretically in leadership positions on this very issue.

Thank you for all the clarifications. As a resident with a young child abutting the tracks, as well as working in the transportation field, I appreciated the thorough explanations. Knowing what has triggered the change is a huge help. Now we know who we need to contact to get the Quiet Zone reinstated.