Horns of a Dilemma : Rail Officials Try to Figure Out How to Reduce Train Noise Levels

It’s 5:38 a.m. in Covina, an hour before Cynthia Doyon has set her alarm clock to ring. But she will not sleep late this morning--or any other weekday morning. A 105-decibel horn atop a passing Metrolink train is about to blow reveille 60 feet from her bedroom.

After a long day selling securities, Joe Busher ought to be poolside behind his Long Beach townhouse with his wife, Jan. But the Bushers can hardly stand to open a window to their back yard, much less seek solace there. Every few minutes, a Blue Line train scoots by at 55 m.p.h.

When transportation planners promised to deliver unto Los Angeles a network of “virtually noiseless” subways and trolley lines, not many people thought to ask what that meant.

Now, roused from apathetic slumber by the roar and bleat of oncoming trains, a growing number of people are starting to ask why “virtually noiseless” on paper can actually be quite noisy in real life. And they’re starting to ask with a vengeance.

“I feel that we have been lied to,” said Jan Busher. The Los Angeles County Transportation Commission “has not told people what the bad side of the rail is.”

Transit officials are scrambling to try to turn down the volume on train whistles and wheel noise, but the patience of people along existing lines--from North Hollywood to South Los Angeles--is growing thin.

Noise complaints that abounded along the route of the Metrolink trains in Valencia and Newhall when the service was being tested in early October appear to have been dealt with successfully.

Residents who live beside the tracks said they were accustomed to the noise of freight trains but could not put up with the shrill sound of the commuter train’s whistle.

“It was extremely shrill and piercing and blown for a long time,” said Ann Irvine, a Newhall resident who lives about 1,400 feet from the tracks. “Myself, the horses, the dogs, everybody woke up with the horn.”

The complaints dropped dramatically after Metrolink officials muffled the whistle and reduced the shrill sound by building a box around the whistle on the locomotive. The change dropped the sound of the whistle from 103 decibels to about 98 decibels, officials said.

“It’s much better now,” Irvine said.

Gail Foy, spokeswoman for the city of Santa Clarita, said the city received “dozens of calls in the course of a week” before the horn was fixed but “our calls have diminished tremendously since they did that.”

Meanwhile, people living near proposed future rail-transit lines are starting to make noise themselves, challenging transit planners’ assumptions and questioning their promises. It could make it harder for regional and county officials to get those lines up and running.

County transportation commission officials said it is taking so long to resolve its Blue Line hum problem precisely because they are looking for a solution that will work for all surface rail lines throughout the county, not a quick-fix applicable only to Long Beach.

“We have to solve the problem for the whole line--for this line and all other lines,” said John Higgins, the transportation commission official in charge of the Blue Line noise-reduction project.

The transportation commission says it has spent nearly $500,000 experimenting with everything from equipping trains with noise-muffling metal skirts to grinding and polishing its rails and truing--grinding down flat spots on--its wheels.

The work, stretching back three years, has shaved decibels off the train’s “noise footprint.” Trackside noise levels have been cut to 82 decibels--about the same level as a rock concert--from an ear-splitting high of 91 decibels, Higgins said. Normal noise levels are about 30 decibels.

But the noise-reduction work is still not enough. Environmental impact reports stated that trackside levels would not exceed 78 decibels.

After studying similar noise problems in Vancouver, Canada, transportation commission workers are convinced the problem can be traced to ridges and other imperfections on the rails and to the way in which the train’s wheels move on its rails.

Cutting the amount of steel touching steel reduces noise.

To attack the problem, the transportation commission borrowed a small self-propelled rail-grinding machine from Vancouver to fix flawed rails in the Bushers’ North Long Beach neighborhood. At the same time, it has used wheel-truing machines in Los Angeles and San Jose to alter the faces of some train wheels.

These methods, which dropped trackside noise in Vancouver to under 69 decibels from a high of 100 decibels, are preferred over sound walls, berms or other solutions because they can be used more cheaply and effectively throughout the Metro system, Higgins said.

However, he said, the solution to Blue Line noise levels may not come soon because each combination of rail and wheel requires a field test. Each test takes time to schedule and clear through the commission’s accounting bureaucracy.

“The urgency is there,” Higgins said, but “there are a lot of things to be taken into consideration when applying modifications to a vehicle. . . . You have to make sure it’s safe and you have to make sure it works.”

However, the neighbors are restless.

“They want to study it. But while they study it to death, why don’t they slow” the trains down “and we’ll all be happy?” said Joe Busher, who notes that train noise seems to decrease markedly as speeds fall.

Equally frustrating, he said, is that the transportation commission does not appear to be considering any real noise modifications in any of the new rail lines it is planning--to Pasadena, Glendale and Santa Monica.

As troublesome as Blue Line hum is proving to be, train horns may be tougher to silence because state and federal regulators require horns to protect public safety.

The California Public Utilities Commission, which regulates all urban transit in the state, requires horns for light-rail lines that intersect public streets. The Federal Railroad Administration does the same for commuter trains, such as Metrolink.

Forced to blow a horn when approaching within a quarter-mile of every intersection--26 times in 22 miles for the Blue Line, more than 100 times in nearly 114 miles for Metrolink--train operators are trying to find quieter, less-offensive horns.

Metrolink, for example, has moved the horns on one end of its trains closer to the ground and is attempting to funnel the noise they make into a “cone of sound” focused on the nearby intersection.

David Solow, deputy executive director of the Southern California Regional Rail Authority, which runs Metrolink, says that “while the horns will be aimed at the grade crossings, the sound will not be bouncing over the neighborhood.”

Executives at the Southern California Rapid Transit District, which runs the Blue Line, are going a step further. They are experimenting with expensive electronic horns that can produce different sounds that are “not nearly as abrasive” as traditional horns.

“Our horns are already near the ground and cone-shaped--and to be honest it isn’t enough,” said Jesse Diaz, the RTD’s rail operations superintendent.