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To answer an upthread comment: yes there are codes in the whistle blowing. Two longs, a short and another long is for approaching an at grade crossing. There are also signals (not always used) for use when working on switching cars in or out on a siding. There are also lantern signals which can be used to tell the engineer which way to go and how fast.
We recently took the Amtrak Silver Star from Cary to Orlando, FL for a Disney vacation. It was great, we will never drive any long distance served by train again. We traveled in a "roomette", that allows you to sleep horizontally & has a private toilet.
We left a little after 9:00 PM & arrived a little after 10:00 AM, so traveled overnight. I can tell you that the train blew its horn through EVERY single residential, or congested area. I did not see one road crossing where the horn wasn't sounded. You get used to it after a while & we slept just fine to the rocking of the rails, arriving in Orlando rested & ready for our first day of activities.
Amtrak seems to take rail safety VERY seriously & has extensive safety related advertising posted in the stations. When you consider that trains achieve speeds of almost 80 miles per hour & can take well over a mile to stop, you see why sounding an alert of the trains coming is a good idea.
It is crazy though. In places where trains are actually useful (that is, most of Europe and East Asia) they certainly don't blow their horns when they go near or through at-grade crossings. It's so distinctive that a train doing 5mph with its horn blowing could make a good tourism commercial. Everybody would know it's about the USA.
The strikes me as one of those regulations that's easy to write but completely idiotic in practice.
In Europe it's far less common for a railroad and a highway to cross at grade. All the high-speed lines beginning with the original TGV in the 1980s have no highway grade crossings at all. And where older lines do, a horn is usually blown or (in eastern Europe) there might still be a person who operates the crossing gates.
Here in the USA, most states adopted laws that require railroads to blow the horn at highway crossings.
In Europe it's far less common for a railroad and a highway to cross at grade. All the high-speed lines beginning with the original TGV in the 1980s have no highway grade crossings at all. And where older lines do, a horn is usually blown or (in eastern Europe) there might still be a person who operates the crossing gates.
Here in the USA, most states adopted laws that require railroads to blow the horn at highway crossings.
I'm not sure I buy that. It's true that in the EU there are lots of train lines without at-grade crossings, but there are also an awful lot with crossings at grade (mostly on freight or non-high-speed routes). It's worth noting that the US doesn't have a single mile of high speed rail by international standards, so comparisons with the TGV miss the point. I can think of at least 5 such crossings near my hometown in Europe. I would often fall asleep at night hearing the late night coal train pass through my village. No horn.
The train tracks run right behind my school, and the trains go by 3-4 times a day. (They go by at night too, as we learned during our first school lock-in!) The PP are right when they say that you stop noticing the sound after a few weeks. For us, it's just white noise, unless we're out on the playground.
Europe is a big place and is not uniform, but I stand by my position. I'll be riding trains there this week.
And I think the 150 mph segments of NY-Boston would qualify by nearly any international standard. Some segments of Washington-NY will be running at 160 by 2016.
Congratulations, I hope you enjoy your train lines. Whilst you are there (assuming you are not on a fast intercity line for businesspeople and tourists), please notice the number of level (at-grade) crossings.
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And I think the 150 mph segments of NY-Boston would qualify by nearly any international standard. Some segments of Washington-NY will be running at 160 by 2016.
Nope, generally HSR is defined as an average speed of over 125 mph on old track that has been upgraded, and much more than that on new track (closer to 200mph). From wikipedia:
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The average speed from New York to Boston is a slightly faster 69.8 mph (112 km/h).[54] Its maximum speed limit is 150 mph (241 km/h) on two sections of track totaling 28 mi (45 km) in Rhode Island and Ma...
A train with an average speed of 70mph which occasionally touches 150 is most certainly not highspeed by international standards. Sorry.
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