Mr. Julian, I guess I'll have to give you a yea and a nay. The yea is that there are locations such as this Gatineau case that I brought out where it's quite feasible to tell the railway to quit shunting at night or quit idling your locomotive outside these nice people's bungalows, and that should be made to stick. If the railway doesn't cooperate after suitable discussion and mediation, then regulation can be brought into play.
There are other locations where I think, frankly, you'd wreck the economy of the west coast and possibly of Canada if freight trains could only operate, say, sixteen hours a day out of Vancouver. I think a lot of business would move to Seattle pretty quickly, and then there'd be a lot of people out of jobs who would follow them. And it would solve the problem because the population would be less dense around the rail yards.
I sound facetious, but these are problems that give us cold shivers when we start reading the history of the last fifty years of transport in Canada, where we see, time after time, rail lines ripped out of the centre of a city, such as Saskatoon, and then passengers such as ourselves having to spend the night, first, getting out to the station, and then waiting for the late train and being nowhere near civilization to do it. So these measures, while seemingly cost-effective and good for the urban population, in the end bring misery to a number of people.
That said, the other side of the continuum is the inconvenience suffered by the residents, and for them there are many remedies available that are not always used by Canadian railways. We mentioned in our paper in-curved sound walls along the track, as used by French national railways and the Swiss. Along TGV lines they keep the noise down. Another thing, which isn't in the power of the railways, is decent sound insulation in new construction going up near railways. Another is strict enforcement of zoning in industrial areas. Yet another is a form of lubrication of the rails, which is available but is not always applied, as well as the use of continuous welded rail to eliminate rail joint noise, and the restriction to the amount of noise that a locomotive can generate.
Oddly enough, the move towards reduced environmental pollution often also leads to sound abatement. A Euro II class engine, such as the MTU engines on the Talent trains in Ottawa--to get technical--those red O-Trains, emit almost no noise. People who live next to the track can't even hear them. The reason is that it's an extremely modern European engine that's muffled properly. There's probably a power penalty from that, but not a big one, and the emission of particulates and gaseous matter as well is much reduced.
Canadian railways are moving toward that, and I think you'll find, as time goes on, switching locomotives will be more of what is now called genset, or the Green Goat, which was pioneered on the west coast actually. That's a hybrid engine that runs a lot of the time on batteries--the Green Goat. The genset puts only as much power out into traction as is needed for a specific job.
All of this means that a great deal more work has to be put into interaction between the communities, between riding offices and the railways. I think a good deal of the problem could be solved if the railways listened better, and that is probably 50% of the problem, sir.