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Tickets for blocking intersections
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It's fifteen minutes in Alabama. We have better things to do than ticket trains, but we have been told that if a train does block a crossing, we can ticket it by calling in the citation number and statute violation to the dispatchers, as well as the time of violation. <br /> <br />I live in Columbus, and the NS spur to southeastern Alabama runs right past the main city fire station, the city/county government center, and a major route to a regional hospital. Normally the only train that uses this spur is a local freight that switches out an industrial park in Phenix City, Alabama, and MeadWestVaco south of Seale, Alabama. They run through town at night, whistles blowing and bells ringing, at about 20 miles an hour. I was in the back of an ambulance, escorting a sick inmate to the hospital one night (he had OD'd on some kind of drugs during booking) and sure enough, we got caught on the wrong side of the tracks from the hospital. It wasn't a problem- we ducked up a couple of blocks past the east end of the yard and went around. We were delayed about three minutes. <br /> <br />More serious was the BNSF Phoenix end of the "Peavine" in Arizona. At this end of the line the BNSF main parallels Grand Avenue southeast through town. It was pretty busy with freight traffic about ten years ago when I was an EMT working with a private company. The main station doing 911 ambulance service for Glendale/Phoenix had five ambulances east of the BNSF line. The railroad was not a real problem until the afternoon hours, where inevitably all calls would be west of the main line. The real excitment would be crossing Grand Avenue (six lanes of rush hour traffic- no one paid any attention to lights and sirens) and then looking down the tracks to see a headlight and ditch lights about a quarter mile away heading towards you at a high rate of speed. You could not hear the whistle blowing (sirens tend to drown out pretty much all exterior noise) but you knew it was going, because there were grade crossings every 500 feet, or so it seemed. <br /> <br />Fortunately for me I had a Dale Earnhardt Jr. clone as a driver partner, who had the interesting habit of threading an ambulance through needle wide openings at a high rate of speed. We never ducked around gates- that would have been too dangerous- but there was a lot of spontaneous prayer going on from my side as we flew across active tracks on more than one occasion. (For those who don't have an emergency services prayer book, this prayer usually started off with "Oh God! We're gonna die!"- a common preface.) <br /> <br />I never resented the railroad for doing it's job- I knew (and know now) that most of the time the train crew was well aware of my presence. There was more of a hazard (and still is) from other drivers who never seemed to notice those airhorn sirens and lights behind them. <br /> <br />I've always wondered what the BNSF crews thought, though, as my red and white ambulance bounced over their tracks not far from their front couplers.... <br /> <br />Erik
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