Deafening train horns were driving a Kansas town to the edge. Then David took on Goliath.
The wail of a train horn echoing in the distance is a sort of romantic, peaceful sound and one that’s been referenced in countless songs, poems and books.
But in Belle Plaine — a small Kansas town of 1,500 that sits 25 miles south of Wichita — train horns have over the years become a screaming, sleep-depriving, sanity-threatening source of constant disruption that some say has diminished the quality of life for residents there.
Now, one of Belle Plaine’s most well-known residents — musician and Bartlett Arboretum owner Robin Macy — has done something that many people said was impossible. With the help of a now-retired civil engineer who shares her passion for ridding Belle Plaine of those incessant train horns, she’s raised enough money and cut though enough red tape to finally win what she calls a “David vs. Goliath” battle.
By the end of 2021, Belle Plain will officially be a “Quiet Zone,” and the train whistles that today are wailing in excess of 98 decibels multiple times an hour — all day and all night — will be required to remain silent as they pass by Belle Plaine on the double tracks just west of town.
And it only took six years.
Macy and engineer Mike Mackay were recently able to secure a $66,042 grant from the Kansas Department of Transportation — a development Macy calls “a big happy Christmas miracle” — and that hunk of money was the final piece they needed to move the project forward.
The effort was a true underdog story, Macy said, a massive undertaking pitting a group of passionate small-town citizens against a giant railroad conglomerate. Victory was unlikely, the project managers say, and that makes it even more sweet.
It also shows how important public/private partnerships can be, Macy said.
“I think that something like this gives a town hope,” she said. “We don’t have to just roll over and just say, ‘Okay here comes big Goliath again. The common man matters. The common man should matter.”
The tracks double
Macy, a well-known bluegrass musician, took over the Bartlett Arboretum in 1997.
She’d taken a wrong turn heading back to Wichita from the Walnut Valley Festival in Winfield and happened upon the property, a 15-acre garden founded in 1910 by Walter Bartlett that had been closed for a few years and had become overgrown.
Macy quit her teaching job and dedicated her life to becoming the arboretum’s steward. Since then, she has turned it into not only a tourist attraction but also a popular concert and wedding venue. The arboretum’s annual tulip festival has become a rite of spring, drawing as many as 10,000 people to gaze at 40,000 colorful blossoms every April.
When she first moved to the arboretum, the railroad tracks just a couple of hundred feet from her property would carry whistling trains past about 20 times a day. The trains, which would fly through four Belle Plaine traffic intersections — including one at Kansas Highway 55 near the Arboretum — are required by federal law to sound their loud horns for two long bursts followed by one short burst and then another long burst and to keep it up until they physically occupied each intersection.
It was annoying but a part of life — something Macy and her Belle Plaine neighbors just lived with.
Then, about nine years ago, BNSF Railway added a second track to the section of railroad skirting Belle Plaine. Suddenly, the number of trains passing each day multiplied exponentially. Where there was once one train an hour, now during peak traffic, 10 trains might pass by in a single hour, announcing their arrival in eardrum piercing fashion.
Life at the arboretum became difficult. Macy eventually learned how to sleep through the horns, but her overnight guests would need at least a night to adjust. Concerts, which Macy was frequently offering on a new outdoor concert stage, were constantly interrupted. Wedding vows would often have to be paused or repeated.
This is not the kind of noise that requires raised voices or closer contact, Macy said. The almost 100 decibels screeching from the train horn is so overwhelming, people can’t hear themselves think much less understand the person standing next to them.
Macy and her visitors weren’t the only ones suffering. Coaches conducting practices at Belle Plaine athletic fields would have to stop what they were doing several times an hour because their athletes couldn’t hear their instructions. People who lived on the west side of town packed up and moved, leaving houses vacant.
Mayor Greg Harlan said he knows of a man who lived 200 yards from the tracks and reported experiencing sudden hearing loss.
“Especially in the wintertime when the leaves are gone, it just rattles the whole town when it goes through,” he said.
About six years ago, Macy had a conversation with her friend Mackay, who lives six miles north of the arboretum and can hear the train whistles at his house, too.
Mackay, a music fan and frequent attendee of the arboretum’s concerts, had experience with the topic. He’d worked for 30 years in the 22d Civil Engineer Squadron at McConnell Air Force Base managing a program that worked with military base adjacent communities that could be affected by noise from incoming and outgoing aircraft.
Mackay, who has since retired, said he thought he could help Macy find a way to rid the area of the train noise.
They looked at many different options but ultimately decided their best shot was having Belle Plaine declared a Quiet Zone. To do so, the petitioners had to provide a “Supplemental Safety Measure” to replace the whistle at the crossings. They could choose from a list of pre-approved measures listed by the Federal Railroad Administration, with input from the Kansas Department of Transportation.
They researched other small towns that had succeeded in establishing Quiet Zones — places like Ogden, Iowa, and Fort Sumner, New Mexico. Macy spent time in Woodward, Oklahoma, another Quiet Zone success story.
Mackay and Macy learned that, as private citizens, they could not make the Quiet Zone application: The city or county would have to. Belle Plaine was on board, officials said, and were willing to submit the application. But leaders said they couldn’t contribute to the $160,000 it would take to implement the safety measures and weren’t interested in taxing citizens to do so.
Over the next six years, Macy and Mackay worked their way through the endless red tape and developed ways to raise the money. Macy said it became like a part-time job, and the duo would spend about 600 hours each year working on it. If they’d hired a consultant to do the work Mackay donated, Macy estimates, they would have spent tens of thousands of dollars.
Macy would pass hats at concerts asking for donations. At Christmastime, she’d send out fancy cards encouraging patrons of the arboretum to contribute. Her husband, Ken White, created a compelling fundraising documentary that outlined the issue — one in which many of the people he interviewed were interrupted by passing trains.
The arboretum eventually received a $30,000 grant from the Lattner Family Foundation and also got $44,000 in state tax credits through Legacy Foundation, the umbrella foundation of the Belle Plaine Community foundation.
Macy was the “cruise director” of the project, she jokes, and Mackay said he was the “guy below deck shoveling coal into the boilers.” Over the years, they’ve set up diagnostic reviews with specialists from Kansas City and Washington, D.C., set up meeting after meeting with officials from KDOT, BNSF Railway and the Federal Railroad Administration, and worked closely with both the city of Belle Plaine and Sumner County.
What was most impressive about the project, Mackay said he learned, was that such undertakings are rarely attempted by non-government officials. Usually, a city makes the application and hires a consultant to do the work.
Now, he said, other small communities have been asking him and Macy for tips on how they did it.
“The one thing we ran across, no matter where we looked, is that this had never been attempted by a group of citizens before,” he said. “It’s typically done by a municipality that has the resources and the budget to do it.”
After six years, they were so close to the finish line, Macy said. They’d already applied once for the KDOT grant and had been rejected. But recently, they took another pass at it, and this time, it worked. The Belle Plaine project was one of 14 Cost Share projects KDOT selected to receive money designed to improve safety and promote economic growth in communities across the state.
Macy said she clearly remembers the moment on Nov. 12 she learned that they’d won the grant. She was in disbelief and called her husband.
“I sobbed my eyes out,” she said. “I started crying and crying and crying, and I ran around and called Kenny and said, ‘I think we may have won this thing.’”
Anticipating the quiet
Belle Plaine’s Quiet Zone will stretch for about 2.5 miles and will encompass four train crossings. But change will happen in stages.
The city already closed one of the crossings — the one at 10th Street — deeming it unsafe.
By the end of 2021, crews will install a “non-traversable median” at the crossing at K-55. It’s a concrete median that will prevent people from being able to drive around crossing arms when they’re down — a move referred to as “the fatal S curve.”
The next phase of the project, which will happen after the K-55 construction is done, will include the installation of different types of barriers called “channelization devices” at Belle Plaine’s smaller Eighth Street and 100th Street crossings.
When it’s all done, residents will still be able to hear the rumble of the trains as they pass. They might still pick up the “ding ding ding” noise of the crossing arms as they go down. And trains will still be permitted to blow their horns in emergency situations.
Experts say that barriers like the ones about to be installed in Belle Plaine actually make crossings safer and are more effective than alerts from traditional train horns, Mackay said.
“A loud noise never prevented anyone from doing something stupid,” he said.
The money raised will finance construction work at the crossings. Project organizers also spent some of the money hiring MKEC Engineering, Inc. to develop the drawings and specs for the construction project.
Mayor Harlan said that the Quiet Zone will be one part of a “rebranding” campaign for Belle Plaine, which is also looking at replacing its water system and has just created a new parks and recreation commission.
Forty years ago, Belle Plaine was home to lots of thriving businesses, he said, including a car dealership, a movie theater, a dentist’s office and a doctor’s office. All of those are now gone — and the city lost its grocery store about four years ago.
But city leaders want to bring Belle Plaine back to life.
“We’re saying, ‘What do we do to keep our town from dying?” he said. “What we’re trying to do is create an atmosphere that’s a good place to raise kids.”
He said he appreciates that Macy and Mackay took the project and ran with it and that they were able to succeed without using city and county money. Now, he can envision a day when he’ll be able to hunt deer without hearing trains blaring and when residents will be able enjoy a local baseball game uninterrupted.
“If it’s quiet, it will be a lot more enjoyable here than when you hear the trains every five minutes,” he said.
Macy said she’s frustrated that after all the work and waiting, the town will have to continue to wait for the project to be completed. Though the actual work will take crews only a few days, BNSF has slated the project behind several others. But it will happen sometime in 2021, Mackay said.
Once it’s done, Macy said, she envisions a rebirth in Belle Plane. Maybe people will start moving back to town, she said. Maybe a new grocery store will move in. At the very least, the residents of Belle Plaine will finally get some peace.
“I just know it’s going to be the shot in the arm this community needs,” she said. “I feel like it’s just the beginning of good news to start rolling back our way. People will be encouraged that Small Town America really does have a voice in this world.”
This story was originally published December 28, 2020 at 5:01 AM.
.jpg)