Train horns to fall silent Oct. 12

The Canadian National train line will officially go quiet Oct. 12.

The 10 towns along the line in Lake and Cook counties filed paperwork for a quiet corridor last Thursday, and, if all goes according to plan, no more train horns will be sounded in two weeks unless there is "imminent danger" at the 45 crossings on the line in those towns.

"Hopefully at 12:01 p.m. that day everything does go quiet," Buffalo Grove Village Manager Bill Brimm said.

It was Brimm who had taken the lead in working to establish the zone along the train line last year. The corridor group includes Round Lake Beach, Mundelein, Wheeling, Antioch, Grayslake, Vernon Hills, Lake Villa, Libertyville and Lake County.

Brimm said the process took a while as the rules were being laid out for creation of quiet corridors. The group also ran into some roadblocks when towns such as Mundelein had to decide what to do about wayside horns at train stations.

The latter devices are an alternate to train horns that Mundelein put in place in 2002. Brimm said village officials had to decide if they wanted to keep them or phase them out and eventually they decided to let them remain.

Other towns have had to do some repairs to bring their train crossings up to safety standards.

Brimm said Buffalo Grove lucked out with Route 22 construction; the Illinois Department of Transportation ended up doing the work needed at that crossing at no cost to the village.

"That was a very troublesome crossing because of how narrow it was," he said. "The construction brought it up to a modern standard with limited turning movement, and the traffic signal became interconnected."

The group overall spent $37,300 to have Lower Cost Solutions evaluate the crossings and present the findings to the Federal Railroad Administration. Each municipality spent less than $4,000 on that part of the endeavor.

Buffalo Grove Trustee Jeff Berman earlier this week lauded Brimm for his efforts to establish the quiet zone.

"It has not been an easy task surmounting the myriad of federal and state regulatory obstacles while, at the same time, essentially herding a group of governmental cats along a very lengthy path," he said.