Voorheesville residents have been trying to create quiet zones at two railroad intersections in the village for more than a decade.
In the Albany County village, residents often wait beside the tracks on South Main Street for a chance to see a train pass by.
But for some residents like Steven Schreiber, the rattling of trains and blast of their horns are a nuisance.
“The noise of the trains is just obvious to anyone who lives here, and particularly at nighttime,” he said.
More than a decade ago, Schreiber created a group consisting of residents who advocate for a quiet zone – an area of railroad intersections where a conductor is not required to sound the train’s horn.
As it stands, a conductor must sound the train’s horn each time they pass through the village on the CSX-owned tracks.
Voorheesville Mayor Richard Straut says that’s because the intersection only has partial gates instead of gates that stretch entirely across the road to prevent oncoming traffic from crossing the tracks as a train passes.
“They have a couple of whistle blows at that crossing and then a couple here. And if that happens 40 times a day, day and night, that’s the issue that people are concerned about, not everybody but the people who have kind of been driving this for the past 13 years,” he said.
But if the village can make safety changes to the intersection, the noisy whistles would no longer be necessary.
“What we’re proposing is to put what they call a four-quadrant gate system in so that’s where a gate would come down on the travel lane and the other oncoming lane, so on both sides of the tracks. So, the theory is cars can’t go around it and it improves the safety of the intersection. So, in that case the trains, the conductors don’t have to blow their horns,” he said.
Schreiber says efforts to attain a quiet zone have been arduous, bogged down in back and forth about funding disbursements, with bureaucratic processes among the state, village and county prolonging the process.
“And actually by 2017 we had full funding for the quiet zone and we thought we were in pretty good shape to go at that point but then the state raised some questions about the type of project it was and whether funding could be released for this type of project without certain pre-conditions,” he said.
There are $420,000 in grants for the project currently under review by the Dormitory Authority of the State of New York.
But the latest hold-up Straut says are disagreements over maintenance fees.
“Essentially CSX said well we want you to be responsible for the cost of maintaining these gates,” he said.
Straut says CSX originally said the cost of maintaining the gates would be $50,000.
“We’ve been going back and forth for the better part of nine months to a year regarding the maintenance agreement, and we’ve made a lot of progress with them,” he said.
He says the maintenance fees cost was eventually brought down to $20,000 but contract terms between the county, village and railroad company have yet to be finalized.
CSX did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Director of Operations for Albany County, Michael Lalli, says the county is currently discussing how to share that expense with the village.
He says the agreement on liability is also holding up the project.
“The liability was basically if anything bad happens at the intersection it’s going to fall upon the county and that was just a huge burden for us to take on,” he said.
Lalli says there is a good chance that the county and CSX can reach a deal as soon as next week.
“We’ve come to an agreement on the terms of the contract, specifically the maintenance fees and the liability, but we just need to clarify a couple very small details like what street lights they want us to use,” he said.
As for Schreiber, he says the goalposts keep moving.
“And to say we’re frustrated is to put it mildly but, that’s the story,” he said.
