The sound and the fury

Residents along an RTD route get loud train horns instead of quiet zones.

Merrilee Saathoff keeps a jar of earplugs at her bedside.

They’re not for noisy neighbors or dogs barking through the night.

They’re for the University of Colorado A-Line trains that roll within a football field’s length of her Park Hill Village home four to eight times an hour nearly around the clock, each train emitting four horn blasts as it clears the crossing at Dahlia Street.

That’s 144 scheduled trains traveling between Denver International Airport and Union Station every day, blaring their horns a total of 576 times — or upward of 17,000 times a month. At a federally mandated minimum volume of 96 decibels, the sound from 100 feet in front of the train equals the noise level of a motorcycle or gas lawnmower heard from just a few feet away.

“The horns are intrusive, and they affect our quality of life and our ability to have a peaceful living situation,” said Saathoff, who works from home in software tech support and often has clients on the phone asking her what the racket is in the background. “I usually sit holding the TV remote so I can turn up the volume when the trains go through.”

It’s a situation the A-Line’s parent agency never intended and one the communities that touch the commuter line’s 11 crossings never wanted.

The plan originally called for “quiet zones,” crossings where

horns aren’t needed because of gates that safely rise and fall like clockwork. But concerns about technological glitches at the crossings resulted in federal officials mandating the use of human flaggers to monitor the gates at each crossing.

That arrangement has kept the horns blowing for over a year, and they aren’t going away anytime soon.

Since the Regional Transportation District launched the A-Line commuter rail service 18 months ago, the trains passing Park Hill Village have sounded their horns more than 300,000 times.

At wits’ end

It’s a frequency that has Saathoff’s neighbor David Martin at his wits’ end. He has even come up with his own terms for when things really get bad. “Daily double” describes the moments when two A-Line trains cross Dahlia Street at the same time, each emitting the familiar two-long, one-short, one-long horn pattern.

On the occasion a freight train on parallel tracks makes it to the crossing in concert with two passing ALine trains, the resulting cacophony from the triple horn blast is something Martin dubs the “trifecta.”

“When all three hit, you just have to put your fingers in your ears,” he said.

Martin has fired off numerous emails to RTD, demanding that it do something to fix the problem.

“They have always said quiet zone, quiet zone, quiet zone,” he said. “None of us thought it would still be this way 18 months later. I can’t open my windows — it’s too much to endure.”

Quiet zones allow trains to forgo sounding their horns at crossings as long as certain safety measures — flashers, sturdier railroad gates, upgraded railroad circuitry and raised medians — are in place to protect motorists.

“It’s probably the touchi- est subject there is in terms of affecting people’s lives,” RTD spokesman Nate Currey said. “After 18 months of these horns, there’s a lot of frustration out there.”

RTD says the necessary safety measures are in place at the crossings, but it hasn’t been able to get approval from regulators to move forward on quiet zones because of ongoing problems with the timing of its crossing arms, which are controlled by a new wireless signaling technology that is still being perfected.

While RTD just last week made some progress on resolving the timing issue — the Federal Railroad Administration allowed the transit agency to remove a flagger from a crossing on the B-Line to Westminster and gave it permission to resume full testing of the as-yet-unopened G-Line to Arvada and Wheat Ridge — train horns won’t be silenced anytime soon.

The agency must still await approval from the Colorado Public Utilities Commission on both the gate timing challenge and G-Line testing — requests the PUC resoundingly denied at a hearing at the end of September but said it would look at again in the coming weeks.

While the FRA last month granted RTD a five-year waiver to run the A-Line and B-Line with flaggers in place until the transit agency proves its crossing gates are absolutely safe, it won’t bend on its 2005 train horn rule in the meantime.

“The routes are pre-engineered for quiet zones,” FRA spokeswoman Desiree French wrote in an email. “However, the issue of constant warning time that is still not perfected on this system is a barrier to quiet zone implementation presently.”

For Denver’s Doubletree hotel on Quebec Street, directly north of the ALine tracks, the impact of the train’s horns is evident in the notice it gives its guests.

“I can readily understand your disappointment with this noise disruption,” general manager Matthew Anderson tells guests in a letter obtained by The Post. “We are all very disappointed that this great amenity for our city and our hotel has turned out to be such a disruption.”

Earplugs offered

Doubletree officials didn’t return messages to The Post, but according to the letter, the hotel provides earplugs for guests and offers box fans and white noise machines for background noise. It also points guests to a “tranquility channel” on TV that they can use to help neutralize the horn noise.

A few A-Line crossings to the west, in Denver’s Elyria Swansea neighborhood, Hector Ramirez also has trouble with horn noise at night. He has called a modest house at Steele Street and West 43rd Avenue home for 17 years, and the constant horn blasts of the last 18 months have made it hard to get good rest.

“It’s hard to sleep,” he said. “We have to close the windows.”

Ramirez’s story is echoed up and down the 23-mile ALine, where passing trains have blasted their horns more than 3 million times at all 11 crossings since service started in April 2016. Residents get a respite from the noise for only a couple of hours in the dead of night, when the train doesn’t run.

Once RTD gets regulatory approval for its crossinggate situation, it’s up to municipalities to apply for quiet-zone status.

Aurora and Denver say they have both filed a “notice of intent” to apply for the designation from the FRA but can’t do anything further until federal and state officials give their blessing to RTD on crossing gate timing.

Once the applications are submitted, train horns can be silenced in as little as three weeks.

Whether everything is in place to get quiet zones activated by spring, when homeowners and businesses start to open their windows again, RTD won’t make any guarantees.

“I can hope with them that when spring comes, it’s a much quieter landscape for everybody,” Currey said.