I get first hand experience with RTD's commuter rail on a regular basis - sometimes on board but mainly at grade crossings. I can attest that the gates and lights are still messed up 2+ years after they started running this thing. How/why they have been unable to "tweek the software" in this amount of time to make this work is beyond me. They still have flagmen at the grade crossings and blow the horn through what were supposed to be quiet zones (you can imagine what the neighbors think of that....). Most of the time they work fine but an awful lot of the time they hang up after a train has passed. These are double track lines with trains running in both directions on fairly frequent schedules. In watching how the crossing signals perform it seems like the issues are when one train passes and there is another train in the vicinity. Problem is the other train can be stopped at a station a mile away and the gates stay down. Considerable distances of the commuter lines are built adjacent to parallel roads. The interaction of the grade crossing and road traffic signals is a huge mess. The system doesn't seem to know what to do sometimes and just stops everyone in every direction for prolonged periods, creating significant traffic issues.
The G line, which hasn't opened yet but has had "test" trains running on it for 3 or 4 months, has a parallel freight line along with parallel roadways and is a real mess. If there are commuter trains and a freight train running you can't even get down the parallel road because the traffic signals stop everybody in all directions while it tries to figure out what the freight trains and commuter trains are doing. There are two flagmen at every crossing on this line as well, 24/7. The transit operator and RTD are suing each other over the mess. The FRA threatens to shut the whole thing down if they can't get this figured out. What a cluster......