1 Year Later, Wakefield's Broadway Crossing Back In Business

WAKEFIELD, MA — The Broadway rail crossing is back — and so are the horns, for a few more weeks at least.

Town Engineer Bill Renault revealed during last week's Town Council meeting a federal transportation agency has yet to officially approve reopening the crossing under its old Quiet Zone status, but the crossing would open nonetheless.

On Sunday, it did. And it came with some noise.

A compromise between the town and Federal Railroad Administration allowed the reopening once additional safety measures were installed, but horns will be sounding when trains approach all the crossings in Wakefield. It'll be like that until a federal inspection grants the town its Quiet Zone status again, which might be about five weeks.

"They were willing to give us that small concession to allow this to open up so we do not have to wait for their slow paper work process to play out," Renault said.

If the Federal Railroad Administration had been quicker with its approval, he noted, this week's opening wouldn't be coming with horns.

The Broadway crossing has been closed for nearly a year for National Grid and municipal work, which was initially supposed to keep it out of action for just a few weeks. But the Federal Railroad Administration wouldn't let the town reopen without forfeiting its Quiet Zone status.

So since then, to avoid horns sounding each time a train approached a crossing in Wakefield, the Broadway crossing had been closed — until Sunday.

"The residents have been through enough," Town Councilor Ed Dombrowski said during last week's meeting.

The town will be grandfathered into the previous standards to be a Quiet Zone. If Wakefield opted to reapply for the current Quiet Zone status, it would have needed to make significant improvements to multiple crossings.

Mike Carraggi can be reached at mike.carraggi@patch.com. Follow him on Twitter @PatchCarraggi. Subscribe to Wakefield Patch for free local news and alerts and like us on Facebook.