Crossing safety: Car broke through gate before, report shows,
Vehicle broke through rail gate on Woodroffe Avenue in 2007, Via Rail assessment noted later
A 2010 report on the rail crossing where a collision between a bus and a train killed six people on Wednesday called for a reconsideration on whether to build an underpass or an overpass, an idea previously rejected because it was too expensive.
The safety assessment was prepared for Via Rail, which took the rail line that runs southwest from downtown Ottawa through Barrhaven over from CN Rail that year. The city government released it Friday afternoon after waiting for Via’s permission.
Typically, the tracks are the rail company’s responsibility, but nearby safety measures are up to landowners — in this case the City of Ottawa.
The 2010 report says bushes had been allowed to grow high enough to block sightlines for drivers on both Woodroffe Avenue and the adjacent Transitway, where an OC Transpo bus apparently rolled north through warning gates and into a Via train heading for nearby Fallowfield station Wednesday morning. The gates, lights and other safety equipment were up to scratch in 2010, the assessment says, but warning marks on the pavement were too close to the tracks and needed to be repainted farther away. The complaints were minor, though, with a suggested change of just a few feet.
Most ominously, the assessment notes that a vehicle broke through a gate on Woodroffe Avenue in 2007, indicating there’d been a close call at the crossing before.
Such accidents are why, when crossings of roads and train tracks get busy enough, rail standards usually call for the two to be “grade separated” by either overpasses or underpasses. The formula is simple: Take the number of vehicles that use the road in a typical day and multiply it by the number of trains that pass through. If the result, the “cross product,” is more than 200,000, it’s probably time for a grade separation.
That’s what CN said when the city wanted to widen Woodroffe Avenue in the early 2000s. In a firm letter the rail company sent the city then, CN said the cross product at Woodroffe was already more than 200,000 and if the city wanted to widen Woodroffe, let alone add the dedicated busway, it would have to pay for the grade separation to deal with “current and future safety concerns.”
That was expected to cost $40 million, but bad ground conditions pushed the price for a pair of underpasses (one at Woodroffe and one at another nearby crossing of Fallowfield Road) up past $110 million, which the city said was “exorbitant.” The city and CN hired a consultant who spelled out plans for a level crossing in 2004, a crossing CN agreed to and the city built.
CN refuses to discuss the decision, saying it’s now Via’s rail line and Via’s responsibility.
The consultant, Wellandbased Bob Fish, said Friday the two parties agreed on the level crossing. He’s on a voyage in the Bering Sea and the Citizen had one email exchange with him.
“When a crossing is constructed or reconstructed, the road authority and the railway must work together,” he wrote. “The proposing party would have to send a notice to the other party and to Transport Canada under the Notice of Railway Works Regulations (Railway Safety Act). If there is an objection the Minister of Transport would then have to rule.”
There apparently wasn’t any such objection.
Fish’s report called for his work to be repeated in five years, to make sure the crossing was working properly. That’s what led to Via’s updated report in 2010, which noted that some of the warning markings weren’t up to standard and that the cross product of the crossing on Woodroffe was up to nearly 236,000.
“Information should be reevaluated with the City of Ottawa to confirm (traffic volumes) and the requirement for a grade separation,” the report says.
‘One time we had a tanker truck on the tracks? OK? And one time we had a school bus on the tracks.’
COUN. JAN HARDER On the need for altering the rail crossing earlier
The city could not say Friday whether there was any such discussion, whether the markings were moved, or whether the bushes that impeded sightlines had been cut.
Coun. Jan Harder represented the area that includes the Woodroffe crossing when the decisions about how it should be rebuilt were made (since a 2006 realignment of the city’s wards, her territory has ended just to the south, at Fallowfield Road). Five of the six victims of the crash were her constituents, and Harder mourned them even as she welcomed a newborn granddaughter this week.
“We have no jurisdiction over the decisions that were made there. We were given the rules and we complied with them,” she said Friday.
She wasn’t part of the key meetings between the city and CN — they mostly involved engineers and transportation consultants — but Harder remembers that an important factor was the opening of the Fallowfield Via station in late 2002, which meant the trains would move through more slowly than they had.
“I remember it distinctly that (CN said) because we will be coming into the station at a maximum 10 miles per hour, we will allow the at-grade,” she said. “No one should assume that we have the power that would have allowed us to have a decision made. They have the mandate — the governing body over rail, whoever it was at the time, always did have the mandate over making those decisions.”
The widened Woodroffe Avenue, the busway and the level crossing have all done what they were supposed to, she said, solving what was then a constant problem with cars stuck in congested traffic stopping right on the track.
“It works very well. It has worked very well. Before we had the widening, we used to have lots of problems. … We used to have police sitting on Merivale Road, on Woodroffe, on Greenbank, watching the tracks. They had to warn people, they had to give tickets to people who’d stopped on the tracks, no matter what signs we put up. One time we had a tanker truck on the tracks? OK? And one time we had a school bus on the tracks,” Harder said.
“This has been a terrible, awful, devastating tragedy. But the decision that was made about the access in that area has worked and it’s solved the problem with the queuing on the track.”