Passenger Trains > Close Call When Grade Crossing Signals on Metra Don't Activate

This looks similar to what happened on the Frontrunner operation awhile back and a FedEx truck got creamed.

I stumbled across this video elsewhere on the Internet.  Does anyone have any more details of what happened?  Signal maintainer foul up? 

Quick thinking helped this motorist live to see another day.   
 

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Looks like a RR maintenance truck in the background near the tower.
 

cop was driving?

maintainer at the bungalo



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/23/18 21:29 by dan.

😲— I bet he changed his shorts after that !! That was close! ( the ped X’ing gate went down after the train passed, too).



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/23/18 21:31 by IC_2024.

dan Wrote:
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> cop was driving?
>
> maintainer at the bungalo

Yeah, looks like the camera was mounted inside a squad car.

The policeman's field of vision is much wider than the camera, hence his rather calm evasive maneuver to avoid the train.

The closer call was for the guy driving the other direction. Fate saved the Honda CRV driver who chose to drive faster than the cop to the crossing. This could have led to 3 smashed cars... wow.

Which is why I always slow down and checkj both directirons when aproaching a crossing. I've seen too many situations when someone didn't...

Bill Deaver
Tehachapi, CA

Looks like 191st St. crossing on the Metra Rock Island District near Mokena IL.  Dan

Wow yeah I always look both ways before crossing as well. Usually seing if the train is a long ways away and if it is worth it to stop. But wow seing that, I will do the school bus thing from now on. Yikes!

Posted from Android

The signal maintainer in the bungalow will have some explaining to do. Crossing only activated once the train was in the island circuit...

cchan006 Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> The policeman's field of vision is much wider than
> the camera, hence his rather calm evasive maneuver
> to avoid the train.
>
> The closer call was for the guy driving the other
> direction. Fate saved the Honda CRV driver who
> chose to drive faster than the cop to the
> crossing. This could have led to 3 smashed cars...
> wow.

Yes, kudos to the officer. However, while his field of vision may be wider than the camera, just look at the obstructions aong the south side of 191st Street. Going westbound there are stacks of lumber and what appears to be a pump station that block the view of the tracks. Eastbound vehicles have multiple signal bungalows, the tower AND the skew of the tracks to deal with. The skew works in favor of the westbound drivers giving them additional split seconds to react.

Google streetview: https://www.google.com/maps/@41.542933,-87.8586354,3a,75y,285.77h,98.84t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1si011nuSLwEzoCyjF1ufoLg!2e0!7i13312!8i6656

Clearly, if the crossing signals were being worked on or malfunctioning, the crossing should have been flagged and trains should have been warned to approach at reduced speed. 

This must have been in the last few weeks judging from the vegetation, weather and the recently rebuilt F40PHM-3.

 

Yes that is 191st St. on the old Rock Island looking west.  The train is an eastbound.
Before blaming the maintainer there are other things to consider.
Did the maintainer take that track out of service? Perhaps he did and the DS screwed up.
Did the train crew have a "stop and protect crossing" order that they ovelooked?

At least the island circuit worked.  Any idea of the date when this happened?

That being said on one railroad where I worked we had a maintainer who could not do anything 
right.  We would work aroiund a failing switch just to avoid calling him.  If you did call him he would
have the switch for an hour and when done it still wouldn't work.  Everyone in the office complained
to management that he was a total incompetant (of course the real incompetent may have been his boss.)
Nothing was ever done to address the situation until one night he was troubleshooting a problem at a busy
crossing and when he was done a train came into the crossing without the gates going down.  God was 
watching out for everyone because nothing got hit. This was a crossing used by city buses.  That was
the last we heard from that maintainer.

I know someone that had a close call at 191st St. crossing about 10 years ago.
A westbound went by, the gates went up and an eastbound (like the one in the video)
came into the crossing before the gates went down.  He called Metra about it. 
An hour or so later someone from the signal department called 
and said that eveything at the crossing checked out and everything was operating 
properly. The Metra person also said that sometimes the trains went faster than they should
and the gates don't have time to go down.  Well, that was a pure BS answer but if they
don't care what can you do?

There is a roadside memorial at the crossing for a young girl that was killed a few years ago when 
struck by a train.

The 191st St. crossing is also notorious for the RailLink blocking it for 20"-30" when they come with a 
handful of cars for the lumber yard.  There is an engine on each end of the 5-6 car train.  The east engine and
inbound cars are cut off and left blocking the crossing while the west engine goes in for the outbound empties.
I have no idea why they don't cut off the inbound cars east of the crossing and let the gates go up while retrieving 
the empties. The only reason I can see for making the move the way they do is that the gates probably will not
go up if  they leave the cars east of the crossing.  Looking at the nonsense in the video I bet it does have something to
do with the gates.

 



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/24/18 08:13 by Englewood.

There was audio on the video. Never head the horn???

WJEX Wrote:
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> There was audio on the video. Never head the
> horn???

It is a Quiet Zone !

I also noticed that after the train clears the signal department employee can be seen
in the doorway of the instrument house.  Maybe he was waiting to hear the horn.

Same railroad, same district that had TWO trains derail, a year apart, going through the 
SAME 10 mph crossover at 70 mph.  Second incident killed someone.  Both engineers said they 
had clear signals.  Signal Department said everything working fine.  Maintainers also in an instrument house
close by in the second incident.  Nothing to see here folks, keep moving on.
 

dan Wrote:
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> cop was driving?

Not necessarily. The "dash cam" thing is starting to take off here in the US. A growing number of the YouTube dash cam videos now feature clips from the US. Heck with all the idiots on the roads these days I've given thought to geting one.

> maintainer at the bungalo

Looks that way. If it was indeed a maintainer he might have had the crossing "jumpered" out. Therefor a "stop and protect" order should have been out on the crossing. Protecting reported crossing actuation failures is one of the things they drill into you as a dispatcher.

3rd_Raton Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> dan Wrote:
> --------------------------------------------------
> -----
> > cop was driving?
>
> Not necessarily. The "dash cam" thing is starting
> to take off here in the US. A growing number of
> the YouTube dash cam videos now feature clips from
> the US. Heck with all the idiots on the roads
> these days I've given thought to geting one.

Not too many cars have bumpers in the front like that, except for squad cars. Height of the vehicle (compared to the Honda) says it wasn't a truck. The object on the dash barely visible in the middle of the camera looks to be radio? radar gun? I'm just speculating, but sharing clues on how I concluded it was a squad car.

Most amateur dash cam videos I've seen would have the driver (and passenger) yell after what happened in the video. "Did you see THAT?" "THAT was close!" "HOLY S***" and so forth. The audio was ON in this video, FYI.

based it on the push bar , which  could be wrong, not the presence of the dash cam

what is interesting is that these trains run on a schedule,  might make the maintainers job easier even, when it comes to expecting a train

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uB_PZ7fMKsI

i figure the op just filmed his monitor is why we don't have correct sound

but it is SLC all over again, did the guy move east?



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 12/24/18 09:05 by dan.

3rd_Raton Wrote:
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> Protecting reported
> crossing actuation failures is one of the things
> they drill into you as a dispatcher.

Somebody needs to tell that to all the new dispatchers, that my employer has hired in the past couple months. We got an incorrect stop and protect just last week. Crew ahead reported wrong street name, and just made up a milepost. Dispatcher gave the crews the wrong rule (failure to activate instead of false or partial activation for the broken gate), and for a crossing that was nearly a full mile west of the one with the problem.

Posted from Android

cchan006 Wrote:

> Not too many cars have bumpers in the front like
> that, except for squad cars. Height of the vehicle
> (compared to the Honda) says it wasn't a truck.
> The object on the dash barely visible in the
> middle of the camera looks to be radio? radar gun?
> I'm just speculating, but sharing clues on how I
> concluded it was a squad car.

Ok, went back and looked at the video again (after seeing it on Facebook the first time) and yes, I see the push bar. Since this was in Illinois it was probably a police car. Down here in Texas at least half the pickup trucks have Bull Bars (look just like police push bars) on them even if the closest they get to a bull is the local steak house.


> Most amateur dash cam videos I've seen would have
> the driver (and passenger) yell after what
> happened in the video. "Did you see THAT?" "THAT
> was close!" "HOLY S***" and so forth. The audio
> was ON in this video, FYI.

None the less I fully expect this video to turn up in the next crop of YouTube dash cam videos.

dan Wrote:
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> i figure the op just filmed his monitor is why we don't have correct sound

I agree.  It appears to be a video of a video.  Someone played it on a big screen TV with the volume down or off and another person used their smart phone to video it off the big screen.  That's my guess as to why the sound doesn't sync.  

Did the signal Maintainer notify the train or the DS about this? Someone's not gonna like this report!