Newer is Worse

While I was walking towards a microwave tower, the crossing lights at Washington Street became active. So I trotted over to the crossing to look for headlights to see if a freight train was coming. To my surprise, I could not see any headlights.

Nothing to the west:

20140604-06 0121

And nothing to the east:

20140604-05 0122

Fortunately, I was walking so I could continue on. But the poor cars were stuck. After about a couple of minutes the gates did go up. I don't know if there was some sort of audit circuit that caught the mistake or if someone manually overrode the signals.

In the almost four decades I have watched the old signaling circuits work, I had never seen a false closure. I remember that there was a big effort a couple of decades ago ago to control the gates based on the speed of the trains so that people would not be tempted to drive around the gates. That is, they made the gate closures accurate enough that you would be total fool to try to drive around them. But soon after the new signaling circuits started working, the circuits made a mistake.

The above false closure happened at 13:42:10. The next train did not come until after I had taken the pictures for the microwave tower, and I was a couple of blocks north of the tracks on Highland Avenue.  I took a picture of the train even though I could barely see it to get a time stamp: 14:07:12. So the gates went down even though the closest train was over 15 minutes away.

And I was hoping that I could digitally zoom in and see if the tank cars were of the safer design. But there were too many tree limbs, and I could not see enough of a car to tell.

Update: during the Spring of 2015, of the five trips I made to the library, I saw a false gate closure duing four of the trips.