Kenora Ontario - Several motorists bore witness to a strange and potentially deadly malfunction at a Kenora railway crossing on Sunday afternoon, 15 Jun 2014, an incident that has left CP Rail looking for a cause.
 
At about 1 p.m. on Sunday, drivers where lined up on either side of the railway crossing on Railway Street near Round Lake waiting for a train to go by when the gates lifted allowing vehicles to begin crossing tracks once more.
 
The problem was the train had not passed at all and was rapidly approaching the crossing, something several motorists didn't realize until they had begun driving over the tracks.
 
"We pulled up to the crossing and there were at least six cars in front of me, and we were about to turn around when the arms came up and cars started to go through. I hesitated because I heard the train operators hammering on their horn to warn us. So I slowed down and stopped, but the car ahead of us still sped across because they must have only seen the train at the last second," said Julia Withers, who was driving one of the vehicles.
 
According to Withers, the train was only 12-16 metres away from the crossing when the last car scrambled across the tracks.
 
Withers' brother Adam, who was in the passenger seat, whipped out his phone and took a short video which shows the train going through the crossing with the gates up, only for them to come back down after the first engine had passed.
 
Withers said the incident shows how many people depend on the gate arms to tell them when a train is coming rather than checking for themselves.
 
"They didn't even look, they just went through. I think people are relying on the arms too much," said Withers.
 
The video shows that the train from the incident was being operated by Canadian Pacific Railway.
 
After being contacted about the incident the railway sent crews to inspect the crossing gate's mechanism on Monday, but they could not find anything mechanically wrong with the crossing gate or the sensors that control it.
 
"Our priority is to make sure that the gate is working properly and then proceed into looking into what took place (Sunday).
 
We're concerned about this report and our signals team went out and did a full operational test of the mechanism and they've confirmed the crossing protection is working as intended," explained CP Rail spokesman Ed Greenberg.
 
Greenberg said the railway's signal maintenance experts will be looking at the Withers' 23-second video to find clues on what went wrong and how to prevent it from happening again.

Alan S. Hale.