Due to a malfunction on an outbound train, sensors at four commuter rail crossing gate systems were damaged on July 21, causing significant delays during part of the morning rush hour and into the afternoon.
Shortly after 8:00 a.m., the gates at Old Sudbury Road, nearby South Great Road, and Lincoln Road got stuck in the down position. Lincoln police and crews from Keolis, which maintains the commuter rail system, responded and ensured the safety of the crossings. A fourth crossing in Cambridge was also affected.
When a crossing experiences any issues, gates are designed to default immediately to a safety mode by going down and staying down until the problem is fixed. The train follows a “stop and protect order” whereby the locomotive engineer and conductors reduce speed and stop at each crossing to confirm that it’s safe for the train to proceed, explained Alana Westwater, Manager of Public Relations and Government Affairs at Keolis. This happens fairly frequently — in Lincoln it occurred most recently on May 18, June 21, and July 2 before the July 21 incident.
These gate problems are unrelated to an April 11 incident in Lincoln where a gate was up when it should have been down, causing a train to narrowly miss hitting a car. The investigation into that incident is ongoing. At the June 27 Select Board meeting, Town Administrator Tim Higgins called the delay in getting more information “frustrating.”
“If much more time goes by without real evidence of progress in the investigation, we’ll call on our elected officials who oversee the MBTA to expedite that process,” he said.
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