By Gagandeep Ghuman
Published: March. 15, 2013
When you buy a home near the train tracks, there is no point complaining about noise.
Dan Gillies knew that.
Still, nothing prepared him for shunting at night, the switching of train from one track to another near his Northyard home.
“It’d shake the house, and once you are up with the adrenalin running, you just can’t go back to bed,” Gillies said.
The shunting seemed to increase or decrease over the two years.
At one point, however, it became too much to bear. Some nights it seemed like an overzealous CN worker was putting an extra effort into it, perhaps to rob his ex of her sleep.
Not too far from Gillies home, Dentville resident Wolfgang Wittenburg was turning in his bed at night, thinking of a way to put an end to shunting.
Wittenburg, who first came before the council in 2010 to raise the issues, said him and some other citizens finally decided to contact CN directly.
To their pleasant surprise, dialogue worked.
A few weeks later, the shunting stopped.
“CN made some real efforts to reduce the noise,” Gillies said.
“Trains still come through at night, but it seems that they are restricting shunting almost exclusively to daytime.”
Wittenburg said it has improved since then to the point that it is no longer an issue now.
“I attribute this mostly to our direct dialogue.”
CN didn’t respond to queries on how this resolution came about, but some residents along Govt. Road might like to know.
Dialogue, after all, might be the way to move forward for Amblepath residents, especially now that it’s clear district won’t be spending $200,000 for the upgrades needed to stop train whistling.
“The expenditure is not contemplated in the 2013 budget,” said district spokesperson, Christina Moore.
Moore said the price associated with the upgrades is too steep for the council to endorse.
Last year, in April, a report from Binnie made several recommendations to upgrading the Amblepath crossing.
These include extending the existing chain link fence along the property line, installing advance railway warning signs, and other signs.
Last year, council members suggested that perhaps the Amblepath strata might contribute towards upgrading the crossing, but that hasn’t happened.
Meanwhile, residents at Amblepath and Spiral Park continue to hear CN trains whistling and idling for long time on the tracks.
“The shunting or coupling during the night or early morning is brutal,” said Amblepath resident Adam Smith.
“They sit idle outside Amblepath for 30 minutes plus at times while the compressors blow off every 30 seconds.”
Another resident Scott Wengi said while the train whistling in the middle of the night can be extremely annoying, it’s the idling of trains outside Amblepath (often for 45 minutes or longer) that is the worst of it.
Now, if only this was West Vancouver.
In 1958, the North Shore municipality adopted the sounding of trains and whistle prohibition bylaw. All 310 crossings in the municipalities are grandfathered under the bylaw.
For that to happen, at least at Amblepath, there needs to be some hard cash or as Wittenburg and Dan Gillies show, a respectful dialogue with CN Railway.
Jean says
For the crossing.. LED,s are cheep and cant be ignored when a train approaches much better then whistle with those Boom Boxes wide open.
Where are some of those handymen and Innovators with a little cash incentive the DOS could make a tender call, Very little cash and I mean little, one could fix it together with the successful mediation of the team already familiar with CN..The idle there should be a penalty like they had at the height of gas crisis in Europe were cars had to sto the engines even on intersections traffic lights.
heather gee says
Jean, thank you for sharing ways that other countries avoid this infernal noise that we are forced to put up with.
Something which hasn’t been covered is that those loud continuous whistles are unheard of anywhere else in the world.
It’s aggressive noise pollution!
This private negotiation shows that almost any positive change can be achieved through negotiation.
Jason Bechard says
1. You bought property KNOWING you were near train tracks and now complain about the noise? True ignorance must truly be bliss.
2. Why the rest of the tax payer base of Squamish should have to foot the bill to make these improvements when the buyers of the house KNEW they were buying adjacent to the train tracks is a totally unreasonable request.
3. If your strata isn’t prepared to help out the costs for making the crossing, ‘Whistle proof’, then maybe its only a few squeaky cogs. If your strata is willing to splitt he cost I’m sure the district would consider it with more weight.
4. Have any of you actually seen the process to start one of those diesel engines once they cool down. The amount of noise the engines make PLUS the amount of exhaust fumes that pour out during the warm up can sometimes obscure the sky totally. Having it sitting idling is a much ‘environmentally friendly’ solution I can assure you. Go down the rail yard and watch for yourself if you don’t believe me. Watch videos on Youtube.
Grizzly says
Really?!?
The sounding of train whistles is an issue for a far larger number of Squamittes than just those living in Amblepath. If Squamish is trying to cultivate an image that the community is more than a series of strip malls and dollar stores, with a bunch of value-less housing on the train tracks, along the way to Whistler, perhaps the District (and others…) should start taking the long view (or at least a view that extents past their noses… and this years squandered budget), and increasing the appeal of Squamish property generally (Brackendale, North Yards, Dentville, Downtown- all neighbourhoods that are essentially uninhabitable due to train whistling).
Allocating a relatively modest, one time, portion of a massive annual budget to solving a problem that would result in millions and millions of dollars in increased property values throughout the community (with corresponding increases in municipal property tax revenues that would likely result in the recovery of the expenditure within the first year…duh…) just makes sense.
It saddens me what Squamish could be, and what it is, with an utterly complacent Council, and a citizenry that doesn’t hold them accountable for such horrendous decision making (ie. this commenter, and his pinning the problem on the folks who bought property in an affordable area).
And no, I don’t live anywhere near the tracks….
Trevor Mils says
Something we need to remember:
1. Almost everything we use on a daily basis was probably carried on a train at some point from manufacture to us purchasing that item. This includes the material in our houses, our cars our furniture and many other things.
2. We only have 2 trains a day past here. In some places in BC there are 60 or more.
3. If there were a major rock slide that wiped out one of the lines in the Fraser canyon, all that traffic would come down here.