RUMFORD – Last week, Rumford felt the tug from a new federal railroad safety rule that was implemented in December.

At Thursday’s Board of Selectmen meeting, Town Manager Robert Welch said Rumford might have to rescind its long-standing train whistle ban, or upgrade the Railroad Street rail crossing.

“This doesn’t affect anyone in Rumford, just people in Mexico,” Welch said.

He was talking about noise from train whistles, which haven’t been heard between 9 p.m. and 6 a.m. since Rumford’s ban went into effect in the 1970s.

The ban established a quiet zone in the southeastern end of town, where railroad tracks on MeadWestvaco property intersect Railroad Street, a connector road between Route 2 and Route 108.

On Dec. 19, 2003, the Federal Railroad Administration implemented the so-called Interim Final Rule.

“Up until last December, towns could petition the state to create quiet zones at crossings. This rule supersedes those rules,” said Kevin Rousseau, an Office of Freight Transportation official with the Maine Department of Transportation in Augusta.

The rule describes specific standards that local decision-makers can use to silence locomotive horns, while improving safety at railway crossings.

It also allows many communities with existing whistle bans to maintain those prohibitions.

Maine has more than 500 railroad crossings.

“As I understand it, most of the crossings that have whistle bans will be able to keep them, because the crossings have been deemed safe enough to continue the whistle ban,” he said Monday afternoon.

But Rumford is one of the few towns in Maine that must add a safety feature, like a raised median or train-activated warning gates, to reduce the risk of collisions at the crossing.

“There’s no need to panic that this quiet zone is going away,” Rousseau said Monday afternoon.

But at Thursday night’s Rumford board meeting, two selectmen – Jolene Lovejoy and Jim Rinaldo – voted to end the whistle ban rather than raise the median or install warning gates.

Selectman Robert Bradley Sr. voted to keep the ban in place.

But at the request of Selectman James Peterson, the matter was tabled to the board’s next meeting at 7 p.m. Thursday, Aug. 12, in the municipal building.

Rinaldo objected to the estimated cost of constructing a raised median or installing crossing gates.

“I would hate to see us spend $10,000 to put in a median or gates, which will just get run into and get broken,” he said.

Rousseau said that according to the federal agency, a raised median costs between $12,000 and $15,000. Train-activated warning gates, however, cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

But the good news, he said, is that if Rumford officials work with his office, the town would have from five to eight years to make “relatively minor improvements” to comply with the the new law.

The final law goes into effect on Dec. 18, 2004.