Watch 06

Why a Crossing Closes for Eleven Minutes With No Train in Sight

Where you stand: back from a grade crossing on a valley floor street, on whatever footway exists. What is wrong with it: often no sidewalk, truck traffic queuing beside you, and long periods when the gates are down and nothing is visible.

The complaint that turned out to be the subject

Everybody who works in this valley has a story about a crossing closing for a long time with nothing going past. It reads as incompetence and it is not: it is what a switching move looks like from the outside.

A through train passes. A switching move does not. It goes forward, stops, reverses, stops, couples, waits for a signal, and goes forward again, and every one of those movements may occupy the crossing without anything appearing to happen. Eleven minutes is normal. If you understand what you are looking at, eleven minutes is also the most interesting eleven minutes available at street level.

What is actually going on

Cargo comes off a hull at a dock and leaves by rail. That means cars have to be brought to the dock empty and taken away loaded, and the taking away is done in cuts rather than whole trains, because a dock track will not hold a train.

So the work is: bring a cut in, place it, pull the loaded cut out, put it somewhere, come back. Each of those involves a reversal, and a reversal near a crossing occupies the crossing. Nobody is idling. The locomotive is moving the whole time, just not past you.

How to read it from the street

Three things tell you what stage the move is at.

The direction of the last movement. If the last thing you saw went left and stopped, the next thing will come back right. Switching is a sequence of reversals, and once you have seen two you can predict the third.

The sound of couplers. A cut of cars taking up slack makes a run of impacts along its length, and the direction the sound travels tells you which end is being pushed. This is the single most useful signal available and it costs nothing to learn.

The gates. They lift between movements if the gap is long enough and stay down if it is not. Gates that lift for thirty seconds and come back down mean the move is not finished, and anybody who drives across in that window has misread it.

What is worth waiting for

The coupling. A locomotive easing back onto a standing cut, the last few feet done slowly, and then the sound running away down the length of the cars as slack comes out. It is the most precise thing done with heavy equipment anywhere in this valley, and it happens within a hundred feet of a public street.

The other thing is a hand signal. Switching involves people on the ground, and their signals to the locomotive are the oldest live piece of industrial vocabulary you can still watch being used. You will not know what any individual signal means and that does not matter. What matters is noticing that a person walking beside a cut of cars is running the move, not following it.

Where to stand, and how far back

Back. Further back than feels necessary.

The rule is simple: you should be somewhere that a vehicle stopping suddenly, a truck swinging wide to make the crossing angle, or anything at all coming off the track cannot involve you. On a valley floor street that usually means a driveway mouth or a fence line rather than the road edge, because there is often no sidewalk.

Do not stand between the gates. Do not step onto the track for any reason, at any time, including when the gates are up. Do not assume a stationary cut of cars will stay stationary, because the entire point of a switching move is that it does not.

The other reason a crossing closes

Sometimes it is not a train at all. A crossing can be closed for signal work, for track work, or because a move somewhere else has knocked the sequence out. From the street these look identical to a long switching move, and the way to tell is that nothing moves at all for several minutes rather than moving in one direction and then the other.

If you have been at a crossing for ten minutes and nothing has moved in either direction, that is what has happened, and the honest advice is to go and do something else and come back.

The relationship with the water

This is the connection that makes a crossing worth a whole afternoon rather than a curiosity.

A dock that is being unloaded generates rail work, and the rail work happens on a delay: the hull is worked for hours, and the cuts of cars move in and out around that. So a crossing near a working dock is busy for reasons you can see two hundred yards away, and if you have already stood at the berth you can predict the crossing.

That is the whole subject in one afternoon: a hull, a boom, a pile, a loader, a cut of cars, a crossing, a street. Ore, stone and salt at three berths is the water end of the same chain.

Not a railfan piece

This publication has nothing to say about locomotive classes, paint schemes, reporting marks or numbers, and does not name railroads. Those are companies and this publication does not print company names. What is described here is a kind of work, visible from a public street, and the reason it takes as long as it does.