For the past four years, a group of residents known as Safer Quieter Needham has pushed for one thing: no train horns in Needham.
While the idea is simple, its execution could be complicated and expensive. Heavy rail cars are required by the Federal Railroad Administration to sound their horns when passing through public crossings where cars or pedestrians could be harmed. To forgo the warning sounds, additional safety measures would have to be put in place, measures that Needham itself would have to construct and implement.
In 2023, Town Meeting approved $100,000 for consultants to provide a cost estimate and design. In May 2024, Town Meeting voted overwhelmingly to appropriate $750,000 more to assess the feasibility of going forward with the effort, creating an expectation that a vote to green light the project might occur in 2025.
But this past March, the Quiet Zone Working Group postponed the proposal’s deadline, punting it to the Fall Town Meeting. However, Select Board member Marianne Cooley said the design work can still continue on schedule, avoiding any delays.
With more than 400 miles of commuter rail track throughout Massachusetts, Needham isn’t the only municipality that has sought to quiet its trains. As of 2022, quiet zones were active in 25 municipalities across the state.
Though regulations are identical across the country, the process of establishing these zones varies from city to city and town to town, as every crossing is distinct.
How quiet zones are established
Though Needham is dealing with the horns from MBTA commuter rail trains, it’s not the MBTA or even the state of Massachusetts that determines whether a quiet zone can be established. Instead, the Federal Railroad Administration relies on certain safety metrics to make that determination.
The required safety improvements for each crossing largely depend on a “Quiet Zone Risk Index,” a metric the Federal Railroad Administration uses to measure how safe a crossing would be without the use of train horns.
Municipalities can reduce the risk index by installing safety measures such as gates, flashing lights or medians to prevent wrong-way traffic.
While the regulations are complicated, the process is also straightforward: If municipalities follow these rules and make the necessary improvements, a quiet zone is guaranteed.
“The one advantage of the federal regulations, as cumbersome and nuanced as they are, is that it provides a clear process that can give you certainty to get to a quiet zone, but you have to have the willingness to persevere,” said Lars Unhjem, leader of Safer Quieter Needham.
The goal of all of these safety improvements is to make each crossing as safe as — or safer — than it would be with the use of a train horn.
Technically, the municipality could also eliminate the need for a quiet zone by closing the road or by building a bridge or tunnel over or under the rail. In most cases, this is prohibitively expensive and logistically difficult. However, the working group has discussed the latter solution in the case of Needham Golf Club, which has a private crossing ineligible for a quiet zone designation.
Quiet zones throughout the state
The city of Chelsea’s population is similar to that of Needham, but Chelsea is nearly one-sixth Needham’s size in square miles. A dense population and several at-grade railroad crossings mean the horns can be heard throughout the city, and are especially bothersome for those who live and work immediately next to the tracks, said Public Works Commissioner Cate Fox-Lent.
New housing developments near the tracks have had to install noise protection for tenants, she said, and hotels nearby have even lost some airline contracts because of the noise.
Chelsea was previously protected from the horns through existing quiet zones. But when the FRA found crossings in Chelsea and Waltham that were out of compliance, the horns came back. Waltham quickly restored its Quiet Zone status within a few months by installing medians. Chelsea is still dealing with train horns, and has been working to update its crossings and remove the horns since 2021.
The city has yet to begin work on construction, despite hoping to do so in spring 2024. The final design will require review by the MBTA and FRA, which could postpone the start date. Construction is expected to take one year to complete.
By contrast, the town of Franklin, again similar in population to Needham, is more than double Needham’s square mileage. As a result, the sounds from its six rail crossings don’t affect nearly as many people.
Like Needham, Franklin also hired consultants to look into potential quiet zone installations, said Town Engineer Michael Maglio. The consultants came back with a cost estimate of nearly $8 million.
Given the cost, the town ultimately decided not to move forward with the proposal.
The most recent cost estimates for Needham’s quiet zones have stretched to $5 million on the high end, which Needham Town Meeting would need to approve to move forward with construction. Unhjem said no one at Safer Quieter Needham is advocating for a “blank check mentality,” and there is a cost at which the project doesn’t make sense. But he said there is “sustained support” for the project.
“We continue to invest in our community in lots of different ways,” Unhjem said. “Why can’t this be part of that list of things that just make the world better for the community?”
Quiet zones were most recently in the news statewide when the city of Beverly came under fire in a lawsuit hoping to end quiet zones as a practice. The suit was inspired by two train-related deaths in Beverly, one in 1999 and one in 2019. The lawsuit was dismissed in 2024, though plaintiffs have appealed the decision.
Beverly has seen a number of train-related deaths in the past two decades, including two fatalities in 2024, though both deaths involved persons trespassing on the train’s right-of-way, not crossing the tracks.
Beverly’s Commissioner of Public Services and Engineering Michael Collins said he is “very sensitive to the families of those that have lost loved ones,” but he doesn’t think quiet zones are necessarily a factor.
“We would never pursue something in the name of convenience over safety,” he said. “In almost every case the victim is a pedestrian trespassing on the tracks. [Quiet zone] rules are specific to vehicles and grade crossings.”
Beverly has more public road crossings of railroads than any other municipality in the state, with 17 at-grade crossings, separated into multiple quiet zones.
Because of the sheer number of crossings in town, Collins contends the train horns are not only disruptive, but don’t serve the purpose they should. As an example, he said the MBTA once ran a test of their train horns throughout Beverly that ignored quiet zone designations, and the test was canceled within hours.
“It was just a constant, constant cacophony of 90 decibel train horns,” he said. “It’s so frequent that you just stop paying attention to it.”
The city of Beverly has “pre-rule” quiet zones in place, meaning it had agreements with the federal government limiting train horns before the FRA established its quiet zone rules. As a result, train horns have not sounded regularly in town for decades. When the FRA created its new rules, Beverly could simply apply to reaffirm the quiet zones, including updating the safety measures in a few crossings in danger of losing their quiet zone status.
The city must reaffirm those zones again with the FRA every three years, to be sure they remain in compliance.
Collins said it was one of the first municipalities to tackle the new rules, which made it more difficult to figure out.
“Now the process is relatively clear,” he said.
Within federal quiet zones, train operators are still entitled to sound their horns whenever they see fit; the quiet zone only removes the necessity to sound it at each crossing.
Needham’s path forward
Consultants continue to work with the town and the Quiet Zone Working Group to develop a cost estimate for the quiet zone work. If everything stays on schedule, the design work should be completed this summer, and a Town Meeting article could be placed on the October warrant, as the group discussed in the most recent meeting.
The group had hoped to ask for the money from Town Meeting this spring, but too many uncertainties about the costs remain.
That’s partially because Needham would be updating safety equipment at five different crossings, and each of its five crossings presents distinct challenges, as different spaces require different solutions.
For instance, the proposal for the West Street crossing is a standard four-quadrant gate, which blocks traffic from any direction across the rail. But on Rosemary Street, the crossing would only require “channelization” devices, or a makeshift median, to prevent wrong-way traffic that would complement the existing two gates already in place. Four-quadrant gates are the most expensive option, so limiting their use where unnecessary would help keep the costs down. In either case, the result is a net safety improvement.
Additionally, in some cases, the new safety measures would require small bits of land that the town does not own, so it may have to acquire easements to complete the construction.
Lastly, Needham Golf Club’s crossing is ineligible for a quiet zone because it is on private property. To solve this problem, the town and course could look into building a culvert underneath the rail to eliminate the crossing, but that would need to be a separate process.
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