In the wake of last week’s collision between a train and a fuel truck, Facebook commentary suggested it might be a good idea to put more controls across that crossing at Highway 9. The suggestion was that there needs to be barricades that go across when a train is coming down the track, in an effort to prevent people trying, and failing, to beat the train.
It’s a compelling idea, especially because it’s on Highway 9, which is the road through Yorkton with the most collisions overall. That’s a natural consequence of being a busy road going through a small city, but it also means that if there are barricades in or around Yorkton, that’s the crossing where they make the most sense.
Naturally, there is going to be a suggestion that the railroad tracks are redirected around the city entirely, though that’s unlikely to happen due to the millions of dollars which would need to be spent to do that. And, in fact, that wouldn’t change the argument that a rail crossing on Highway 9 needs a change.
Let’s engage in a hypothetical, let’s say that the money did come available to completely redirect the railway around the city. Now, whatever route that railway would take, it would have to cross Highway 9, because the CP line needs to go from east to west. That’s why it currently bisects the city at a diagonal, and why if redirected it would cross the same highway, though likely at a different point. So even in this best-case scenario, we’re looking at a difficult crossing.
A railway track crossing Highway 9, wherever they do it, would need barriers or an overpass, like you see south of Melville. Given that our hypothetical involves the spending of money nobody actually wants to spend, and the current location of the crossing is at a slightly congested point where there simply would not be the room to install an overpass. The only solution would have to be adding barriers to the crossing.
As it stands now, while the crossing should be relatively low speed, for both trains and traffic, in reality it tends to be a bit higher speed for both. People, seeing the edge of the city in sight, have a bad habit of speeding up in that area before the speed limit also increases. Trains are typically slowing down as they prepare to enter the city, or going slowly as they travel through the city. But even a relatively slow-moving train can still do damage, as we saw last Thursday.
It’s a high traffic location, for both trains and cars, and that means it’s the kind of place where there needs to be a lot of control in place. Moving barriers would be a good idea, to prevent more accidents in that crossing.
The trains aren’t the biggest problem on that highway, however, and the main ones can’t be solves with movable barriers. We can, and should, reduce the risk of rail-based accidents in that intersection, but the question of how to stop people from driving into each other is much more complicated and harder to answer.
