TAMPA — City Hall has won a $1.35 million Florida Department of Transportation grant to help create a downtown "quiet zone," where passing CSX trains won't blast their horns in the dead of night.

The zone isn't expected to be in place before fall 2016, and it can't come soon enough for downtown residents regularly awakened by the horns.

"This is great news, obviously, for SkyPoint and for the downtown community and its businesses," SkyPoint Condominium Association president Jeffrey Zampitella said Tuesday. "We've been looking for this for a long time."

And it's not just welcome news for people trying to get a full night's sleep.

Dr. Arnold Buckley has lived in SkyPoint since 2009 and says everything comes to a halt when a train comes through, blaring its horn. That includes not only events at Curtis Hixon Waterfront Park but telephone calls he gets from the hospital about whether to admit a patient who has come to the emergency room.

"I literally have to stop and wait for the train to pass to talk about someone in the emergency room," said Buckley, a past president of the Uptown Council, a neighborhood group for downtown residents. People might think the train horns are "just some annoying sound," he said, but for him and other doctors in his building, it's a bigger problem. "I can't admit them if they can't hear me."

What has exacerbated the problem, Mayor Bob Buckhorn said, is the number of new downtown residents.

Twenty-five years ago, he said, "when you had 600 people living downtown and 300 were in the Morgan Street jail, the trains were not a factor," Buckhorn said. Now, with thousands of residents in the urban core, "it is a problem."

The total cost of creating the zone is expected to be $2.7 million. Buckhorn expects downtown redevelopment property tax revenues to cover the other half of the project's cost. Florida law requires those community redevelopment funds to be spent in the area where they are collected.

With that money, the city plans to add safety features to nine public road-rail crossings downtown, from N Jefferson Street to Doyle Carlton Drive. The work will include installing gates, medians and signs to comply with quiet zone requirements established by the Federal Railroad Administration.

Once the features are in place, CSX engineers will be able to pass through downtown without using their horns to warn motorists of their approach. In the absence of an approved quiet zone, federal rules require engineers to sound the horns 15 to 20 seconds before they reach a public crossing.

City officials have indicated that construction could start in June and take about 15 months to complete. That would allow engineers to lay off the horns starting in October 2016.

Contact Richard Danielson at rdanielson@tampabay.com or (813) 226-3403. Follow @Danielson_Times.