Those readers who have been awakened most nights during the last month can thank Florida. It is largely Florida’s fault that trains now must sound their horns at railroad crossings nationwide, including those that until recently were exempted. The new rule is a safety precaution that, however helpful, must also present some risk of drowsy daytime driving for anyone unable to sleep through a nearby tooting train. A possible remedy for cities that would prefer quiet, like the train whistle itself, calls distantly from the darkness.

The debate over whether train whistles were a needed safety function or a nighttime nuisance got rolling in 1984, when the Florida Legislature passed a law allowing whistle bans at crossings that were equipped with flashing lights, gates and warning signs. Though the equipment operated, it appeared not to work: Where train whistles no longer were blown, accidents tripled within five years. The Federal Railroad Administration wisely issued an emergency order to again require horns to be sounded at all crossings.

Then the administration looked around and noticed that it wasn’t just Florida drivers who were having trouble – a survey in the mid-1990s showed that accidents were 84 percent more likely to occur at a crossing with a whistle ban than if the ban were lifted. Congress got involved five years ago, and the matter chugged along as you might expect, then the new rule went into effect last month and a mere 21 years after the problem began in Tallahassee, Fla., sleep ends in places such as Brewer, Maine.

Some people locally find the sound of a train whistle soothing; others called city hall to complain about the noise.

As a result, Brewer and other Maine cities are looking into what amounts to a more sophisticated version of what Florida tried, called quiet zones, which require the zones to be at least a half- mile long, be equipped with gates, lights, warning signs and other safety measures and still allow the train engineer to sound his horn in an emergency. Brewer City Manager Steve Bost’s advice for other communities thinking of this is to start early because the process for meeting those requirements is long and arduous.

Bangor has its own set of crossings, and though City Hall has had very few calls of complaint about the train whistles, it also has condominium development within several yards of a crossing along its waterfront. It would be worth quite a lot not to have a horn blowing near the resting heads of its newest residents.