City considers stopping train whistle on Lorne Street crossings

KAMLOOPS — Ten times a day, a 90-decibel whistle blows just metres away from some Lorne Street homes.

The ground rumbles, coal dust floats in the air, and car traffic can be stopped for up to 15 minutes as a one-kilometre-long train passes through.

This wasn’t the case before last April when coal trains were routed through the area. Fred Baxter lives in an adjacent townhouse and worked on a petition to city council to stop the train whistle. He says hundreds of people live in the area and find it hard to coexist with the train traffic.

“It disrupts their sleep patterns at night, it makes them anxious during the day, it makes it very difficult to conduct any sort of socialization outside the complex or, for that matter, inside,” Baxter says.

The City of Kamloops will consider putting a stop to the whistle as a supplementary budget item. The price for the change would be $1.2 million, plus the cost of acquiring necessary land.

That money would pay for additional warning lights and bells plus fencing along the tracks. CN Rail and Transport Canada would need to evaluate the changes to make sure it was safe to stop the whistling.

Though the city has been successful at whistle cessation before, currently there is no way to know whether this project would be enough to put a stop to the whistle.

The proposed project would be finished in 2027 and the city is asking for feedback on all supplementary budget items.