The West Medford Grade Crossing
There’s been a bit of chatter about this little red hut in West Medford in a gallery in Facebook. The gallery is part of a Facebook group called Only people who aren’t from Medford call it Meffa!. And I thought that was pretty funny, so I joined and posted some photos of the West Medford Train Station. Time passes. Some comments are made about people drinking in the hut. I add my two cents. More time passes. And today, I am blogging about the hut because I was at the station this morning and things were a little different.
There is a derisive quality to the comments being directed at the flag-people that work out of this hut that I think is unfortunate. This post is an attempt to illustrate some of the day to day events that probably lead to the requirement that there be an active flag-person at this grade crossing. Here is a typical scene – a nice, fall day. The Lowell Line commuter train pulled by engine 1010 has just crossed High Street. You can see the flag person at the hut watching the train heading towards Boston, it having just passed the intersection. Some of the attitude directed at these folks is clearly because the crossing has automated lights and gates both on the street and the sidewalk. So it might seem like there’s really no need for a manned crossing.
I have seen references that say there are only two manned grade crossings in the Boston area, but I cannot confirm that. Here’s a similar scene from earlier this winter. Except you will notice that this is not a normal commuter line train. This is actually an engine pulling a second engine (back to back) up toward Lowell. And here’s the thing. If you hang out at this station, you realize that there really is a whole world around rail transport that we take for granted. There are work trains and cabooses and tie-replacement trains and so forth and they are actively used to run the railroad. And I suppose it really looks like this guy is just there to “waive (sic) to the engineer” as someone said on Facebook.
Of course, the reason he seems surperfluous is that there is nothing wrong on this particular morning with this particular train. Sometimes, there are things that go wrong. One morning late last year, a train broke down while it was stopped in the station. It came in from Lowell, stopped to pick up passengers, and then couldn’t start again. And in that situation, the flag-person was able to direct traffic from High Street safely across the tracks while they got the engine trouble sorted. Just this January, a woman was killed on the tracks here by a Downeaster. Some trains, like the Downeaster and the express trains for the MTBA, don’t stop. They go right through the station at speed, although there are rules that sometimes prevent this. For example, a Downeaster is not allowed to pass through a station when there is a commuter train stopped in the station (on the opposite tracks, obviously).
Yesterday morning, I got stuck in traffic before I got to the station and it seemed to be taking longer than usual to clear. Obviously, when a train comes through traffic backs up a bit in each direction. But it usually doesn’t take that long for things to move again, not as long as it did. By the time Alex and I got to the platform, that train was long gone, but another one was approaching. Except that it stopped before the street. I was quite surprised. Even though I have talked about the unexpected things that can happen on the railroad, they don’t happen that frequently when you are only there for 10 minutes a day a week on average. So Alex and I are watching this train and lo and behold, an engineer pops out from the side.
And it is immediately obvious what is going on. There is, for some reason, no flag-person available to man the crossing. And as a result, someone from the train itself has to cover this function – the role of ensuring the traffic is halted and the train can pass without interference.
So every train that came through West Medford yesterday went through this drill. Clearly the railroad authorities take the safety of this crossing very seriously. So I would advise some restraint on behalf of those who want to associate the hut with careless drinking. Maybe that does go on, I don’t know. But I think the size of High Street and its proximity to the West Medford Train Station probably means there’s going to be a flag-person helping out for the foreseeable future, and from what I’ve seen, that’s a good thing.
