Already faced with the prospect of Friday night high school football games on their formerly bucolic urban refuge, residents of Nicollet Island last month were rudely awakened--several times--by train whistles.

As Michelle Bruch reports in the Downtown Journal, several Burlington Northern trains, which routinely traverse the island, inexplicably blew their whistles at railroad crossings in what the federal government has designated as a “quiet zone.”

Burlington Northern spokesman Steve Forsberg called the commotion the result of a miscommunication. “Someone made a mistake and set up instructions to blow whistles at all crossings recently,” he explained. “Whistle posts along the track mark where they are supposed to begin blowing.”