Train horns make life ‘frustrating’ for residents of this Tacoma neighborhood
Residents in Old Town Tacoma say they have been kept up at night lately by the blaring horns of trains passing through the area.
The trouble is centered at the railroad crossing near the intersection of McCarver Street and Ruston Way. City officials say a system that allowed for a quieter, less jarring warning to pedestrians and motorists is no longer working. That means train operators are required by federal law to sound their much louder onboard horns. Residents say that has disrupted their quality of life in recent weeks.
Kurtis Kingsolver, the city’s interim public works director, said the city has been searching for a replacement for the “automated wayside horn system” since last year. When it was functioning, it would sound a horn that was audible in the immediate vicinity of the train tracks and pedestrian crossing.
Now that the system is down, train operators sound the horns on their train as they approach McCarver Street to announce their presence. The sound of those horns reverberates through the Old Town Tacoma neighborhood and beyond.
Kingsolver said the wayside horn system still works occasionally, but because it’s not consistent, train operators have to sound their own horns.
City spokesperson Maria Lee said the wayside horn system has been in place for about 20 years. Kingsolver said it’s now at the end of its life, and the city is searching for a replacement. The replacement likely will be in place within seven to nine weeks, an effort that will cost the city about $50,000, Kingsolver said.
He estimated that the new automated wayside horn system will last another 15 to 20 years.
The loud train horns have been a nuisance to people like Emilie Burns, who has lived in Old Town since 2019. She said she started to notice the loud horns about a month ago when they would wake her up multiple times a night.
“It’s frustrating to not get good sleep,” she told The News Tribune. “That’s definitely a problem. Feeling tired for work, it’s beyond a nuisance when something like your sleep is disturbed.”
The frequency of the horns varies highly depending on the day, but trains pass as often as 15 times a day at all hours, she said.
Albert Hailey, Burns’ partner, said the horns that he heard when the wayside system was functioning were almost “endearing,” giving the neighborhood character and maintaining a kind of white noise in the area.
But now, “it feels like they go out of their way to honk the horn as loud as possible and as obnoxiously as possible and all hours of the day and night,” he told The News Tribune.
District 2 council member Sarah Rumbaugh, whose district includes the McCarver intersection, said she has heard from several business owners, constituents and friends in Old Town about how disruptive the train horns have been recently.
Rumbaugh said the horns have been audible to her all the way from Northeast Tacoma, and she sympathized with people who have been affected by the increase in noise.
“If you had a baby, and you weren’t used to hearing that, that would just be, as a parent, I would just be livid because I’m trying to get my kid to take a nap, and you’re not used to that,” she told The News Tribune.
