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We have received a reply from Michael Haupt the General Manager for Summerhill Homes, in regards to our being disatisfied with how the sale process went for our home in the Tamarack subdivision of Edmonton, Alberta, and how difficult it had been to gather information to make a more informed decision.
This is a high-level summary of his response:
- A ground vibration study was performed for Dundee (the area developer) on May 23 to June 2 2003 and established that “the ground-bourne vibration level at the building location is expected to fall well below the Reiher and Meister limit of ‘barely noticeable to persons’…
- On page 2 it is shown that Dundee decided to ignore the CN recommendation for maximum ground vibration and build closer to the tracks than they needed to. “…the ground vibration level at the 45m setback will be approximately 0.16mm/sec slightly exceeding the CN criteria of 0.14 mm/sec.
- Certain statements in the study such as on page 3 where it says “As can be seen from Figure 3, the anticipated vibration level at the 45m setback location will be still substantially lower than that caused by bus traffic in front of the house” contradict with our actual experience. We suffer significantly more disturbance than when we lived in a home on a bus route.
Even more concerning is that the construction that is occurring across the alley from us (new homes being dug and built) is causing less vibration and noise than the train.
You can download/read the full cn-rail-line-assessment-tamarack here.
However Mr. Haupt did offer a propsoal. Summerhill Homes is willing to form a committe to review the vibration noise and have another vibration survey performed to see if there have been any changes in rail operation (the last survey was 6 years ago) and if they are affecting homes.
Summerhill and interested homeowners would share the workload and cost. If you are interested in participating in this please e-mail Brent at knowedge@hotmail.com
That said, even if there are problems found, we would still need to try and work with CN Rail to do something about changing the way the rail line works and based on my discussions with Transport Canada and CN, this is very unlikely. This is one of their most important rail lines.
We haven’t decided exactly what we are going to do. All parties, including the homeowners, share some of the blame but I can’t help but feel that the City of Edmonton and Dundee are the biggest culprits here. There was no need with such a large land mass available to build right beside the tracks.
Anways, if you are interested in working with Summerhill to do another vibration study please let me know.
The second attachment a Lot plan
Mr. Haupt also included a tamarack-area-map.
The date on the second PDF is interesting. September 2007. I suspect many homeowners had already started the construction process. (Sorry for this document being upside down, that’s how it arrived to us).
Additionally, unless I’m missing it, I can’t find a scale on this map to determine how far away the houses are from the line. This just goes to show how difficult it was to find any real information when we were making our initial decision to build our home in Tamarack. The maps we received during our consideration period are even less detailed than this one.
There is a train line in this picture but its hard to see. This picture is from their site at