Stouffville GO train whistles not stopping any time soon

yorkregion.com
Aug. 29, 2017
By Simon Martin

There’s no getting around it. It’s a lot nosier at 11:30 p.m. in Stouffville these days. The sound of the late night train rolling into town is unmistakable. The train conductor lays on the whistle at Ninth Line, at Reeves Way, at Hoover Park and at Main Street. Whether this is a problem, however, is up for debate. The horn is not needed when it crosses Millard Street or Bethseda because those rail crossings meet Transport Canada’s whistle cessation standards.

Council has long had whistle cessation at Reeves Way and Hoover Park on its agenda, but now it seems support for the measure is waning at council.

At the Aug. 22 meeting, council deferred a decision to do engineering work on whistle cessation on the two crossings until 2018. Some councillors didn’t mince words with what they thought about stopping the train whistles.

“The reality is the whistles and noise save lives,” Ward 3 Coun. Hugo Kroon said. “We are going in the wrong direction. No way I’m going to support whistle cessation. My residents' lives are far too valuable.”

Ward 1 Coun. Ken Ferdinands also said he was certainly against it.

Ward 6 Coun. Rob Hargrave, whose ward encompasses the two crossings in question, said a lot of his residents are concerned about the late-night whistles. He wanted to know if there were improvements that could be made so the whistles wouldn’t be needed late in the evening.

The design of the whistle cessation features for the two intersections was estimated to cost $61,117.82. To advance the whistle cessation process, infrastructure deficiencies are required to be addressed at both crossings, town staff said.

Back in 2011, council based a bylaw to stop whistles at the Hoover Park and Reeves Way crossings contingent on making the upgrades to the intersection. The town had set aside $100,000 in its 2017 budget for whistle cessation measures, but chose to defer the motion until next year.

The City of Markham has planned to stop horns from blowing next spring at a cost of $6 million.