A malfunctioning whistle is being blamed for an incident that left many Quayside residents scrambling from their beds and fearing a railway disaster was imminent.
The Quayside Community Board wrote to the city and railways after a train whistle sounded at 4:50 a.m. on Sept. 12 for 60 seconds or more while traveling the length of the rail yard at less than five miles per hour. While New Westminster residents are familiar with train whistles, but the duration of this whistle had many people fearing the worst - including Mayor Wayne Wright.
"It woke me up, which it never does," said Wright, a Quayside resident. "As I listened to it thinking it was going to stop and it didn't, I right away thought there was an accident."
Wright quickly threw on a coat and went to his balcony, where he watched light after light being turned on at neighbouring apartments, and heard residents screaming at the train.
"My concern still was that it was a disaster," he told The Record. "I am thinking, 'I have to be ready to go.'"
The incident occurred three months after the tragedy in Lac-Megantic, Quebec, when a runaway train rolled down a steep slope into town, derailed and exploded, leaving 47 dead and ravaging the downtown area.
Wright wasn't summoned to the city's emergency operations centre because of any sort of disaster, but he did raise the issue as a concern at city hall.
The Quayside Community Board also penned a letter to railways, expressing concern about "a serious misuse" of rail safety equipment, and asked that the matter be investigated.
"This event woke hundreds of people from their sleep," stated the board's letter. "Numerous eyewitnesses, thinking the worst, went and rushed out onto their balconies and could see from the lights of the locomotive that there was no visible obstruction, hazard or person near the tracks."
Wright said the railway has looked into the matter and determined it was an accident, not an intentional misuse of the whistle.
"They say it was truly an accident. It got stuck. I think it would be true," he said. "There were a lot of inspections done on it. They sent us a report that it was in for repair and the repair information came back to us."
Coun. Chuck Puchmayr, a member of the city's community advisory panel that addresses rail issues, said the railway looked into the matter.
"They looked at all their logs, they interviewed their engineer. They said there was a broken air line in one of the horns," he said. "They knew exactly when it happened, how long it went off for. They said it was a malfunction."
