Western Noise Corridor?

Transport21 Fan

as Johnny Cash told us all, "I hear the train a coming...it's coming around the bend"


While on the Sligo train last week I noticed how the train drivers blow the train horns as they approach level crossings for safety reasons. The noise even on a railcar is very loud and I would imagine can be heard some distance away.

I was wondering:

A) Do IE train drivers have to sound the train horn as they approach all level crossings - is it an official requirement?

If so;

wouldn't the vast numbers of level crossings between Tuam and Coolooney essentially result in a sonic tsumani of almost uninterupted train horns everytime a train transverses the line?

So much is made by those who claim they support the WRC on eviornmental grounds (LOL!), but isn't sound pollution also part of the enviormental impact as well. These trains won't run of embankments for much of the journey - they run at grade right up next to hundreds of homes in peaceful Connacht.

The people who live along the WRC generally live in old gate keepers houses which are inches away form the tracks. Their lives will be a living hell if trains every come back from the noise pollution. We are not talking one or two houses here but hundreds and hundreds of families.

Was this major quality of life/environmetal issue considered in the McCann Report? Seems to me that a lot of the reasons people come to the West of Ireland will be destroyed by WestonTrack and their supporters if they get their way.

Also, do the WRC gang with their whole "the people of the West!" hysteria show any kind of consideration for the people of the West who live right up next to these level crossings and their approaches and how they will be driven mad by the sound of trains just outisde the living room window?