Nova Scotia's highest risk railway crossing in Brookfield: Transport Canada

The mayor of the Municipality of Colchester County thinks Transport Canada's risk assessmentofrailway crossingscould help local governments make them safer.

But Bob Taylor says he never knew about a federal list rankingcrossings based on risk factors, or what it found in his jurisdiction.

"No, not aware of lists, or where we rated,"he said. "I'd be very interested in that."

• Transport Canada's list of 500 'highest risk' railway crossings not widely shared

Colchester County is home to Nova Scotia's highest-risk rail crossing, located inBrookfield.

It can be foundwhere the CN line between Halifax andTrurocrosses Highway 289.

According to a risk assessment conducted in 2014 by Transport Canada, the crossing was ranked 43rdin the country in terms risk factors that could increase the likelihood of collisions. The federal agency explained that changes made to crossings after that date are not reflected in the ranking, and that a reassessment today would not necessarily yield the same results.

Transport Canada also saidthat higher or lower risk levelsdonot necessarily mean they are dangerous, but rather is ameasure in time of factors than could increase or decrease the likelihood of collisions

A well-known problem

Heidi Cooke grew up in Brookfieldand runs Hurricane Heidi's Cafe at the Brookfield Bakery.She remembers trains striking two cars at the crossing while she was growing up.

"The bell, it would ding, before we had the gates. And you can't see the trains, but you get tired of waiting. So people would want to go," she said.

But automatic gates at the crossings have made it much safer.

"You have to wait now. Nobody goes around it. It means business when the gate drops," she said.

The database

The list of high risk crossings was generated in 2014 byTransport Canada in partby a risk assessmentcomputer model calledGradeX, that was developedfor the department by the University of Waterloo to assist with targeting improvements to higher-risk crossings. The GradeX system is only made available internally to Transport Canada staff.

In order to assess risk factors, the model evaluatesfactors such asvolume or road rail traffic, train speeds, number of tracks andwarning devices present.

CBC News was given the ranked listofcrossings from Transport Canada generated in 2014, which showed thatNova Scotia hadfour of Canada's top 500 highest risk crossings.All of them are on the CN line that runs north from Halifax to Truro.

While none of these four crossings have seen an accident in the past 16 years, the risk at railway crossings to Nova Scotians is real.

Since the year 2000, the Transportation Safety Board (TSB) has recorded 41 crossing accidents in Nova Scotia.

Those crashes caused five serious injuries and five deaths, the most recent of which occurred in 2010.

'No point' in hiding information

A senior manager with the Transport Canada thinks the federal government has a responsibility to share all possible safety information with local authorities.

"There's no point in keeping valuable safety information secret. Get it out there. If something can't be done by somebody to improve it, maybe it could be done by somebody else," said Dan Holbrook, western regional manager for the rail and pipelines investigations branch of the TSB.

"I don't see anything to be gained bynot being entirely transparent with safety related information," he said.

An accident last week at a railway crossing in southern Ontario killed two women, aged 37 and 39.

That crossing had no automatic gate, even though Transport Canada assessed it as the fourth riskiest street-level crossing in Canada.