If there is one thing you can be assured of in Humboldt, it's that if you're late for something on the other side of the tracks, there will be a train there to block the way. The train is a constant source of Raspberries on this page. It sits over the crossing at Main St. at the busiest times of the day for traffic - around 9 a.m., usually around noon, and at 5 p.m.It's a source of irritation, for sure. But in years past, there was always the alternative to waiting at the crossing, and that was trying to go around the train at either end. But these days, that's getting hard to do.Trains are getting longer. And crews seem to be getting surlier. Growing up on the wrong side of the tracks from town, and with a railroader father, trains were a constant part of my childhood. I was late for everything - dance lessons, figure skating, school, special events - because usually, there was a train on the tracks. But we never waited at the crossing for more than 20 minutes - that was how long they were allowed to block a crossing. And if the engineer got the end of the cars within three of the crossing, he would clear it so that traffic could move across. I even remember crews breaking the train to let us cross once they reached the 20-minute mark and the train wasn't quite ready to pull out of town. But that's not the case these days. Trains are miles long. Switching cars around in the yard takes a long time. The days of breaking a train to accommodate traffic seem to be long gone, as is the 20-minute rule. And it gets kind of scary when the train blocks all the crossings in town.That's what happened in Humboldt recently, it was reported to me. The train blocked all three crossings with a train that was very long. And while that might seem like not such a big deal, just imagine if you were on the south side of the tracks, dealing with an emergency of some kind. Imagine if you needed an ambulance, or your house was burning down, and no one could get to you because of the train, even if the delay was only a few minutes.When you're waiting for help in a dire situation, time already seems to crawl. Add a delay in the form of a train, and you might be pulling out your hair by the time help reaches you. The local ambulance service, fire department and police are resourceful characters; I don't think they'd let a blocked crossing defeat them. But when it's their job to get to someone or somewhere as quickly as possible, and they keep finding their routes blocked, they might have something to say about that afterwards. Finding someone to listen to what they have to say could be difficult, though. The local crews don't have any say in when trains come through or how long they are. They are also under huge pressure to switch cars as quickly as possible, and to get moving again, so traffic backing up probably isn't high on their priority list. And finding someone at head office to talk to you? Good luck. The rail companies are huge, bulky machines. It's difficult to find anyone to talk to within it - at least, anyone who could or would affect any change. The rail companies are credited with building many of the communities in Saskatchewan, and they remain a fixture on the prairies. But it would be nice if they weren't such a fixture on the crossings... especially all of them at once.
