dibber25

Seems to be a strange double standard that Harper was allowed to visit the accident scene but Burkhardt wasn't - however badly he handled his interviews. Just read some interesting data regarding MMAR incidents and the national average (the US national average I think, although I no longer have the figures in front of me, so I can't quote them). Lots of people upset by the Burkhardt's reference to an 'incident'. Of course, the guy just lapsed into 'railway-speak' as 'incident' is the word used regardless of the magnitude of the accident. I recall being told that rail staff in 1952 received a message regarding an 'incident' at Harrow. 112 people died in that incident.

No, I'm not saying they should never have had that traffic. What I'm saying is that, in my view, there should have been some investment in the railway to carry that traffic. It was a big increase in total tonnage and individual train weight on what appears to be a tired railway with low overall speeds presumably for some good reason I would have expected that some of the money from what is (or certainly should be) a lucrative contract, is ploughed back into the infrastructure. What I see is a railway with a use-it-up-and-throw-it-away philosophy. Grab the traffic, run it as slow as you must in order that the trackbase and the track hangs together for as long as possible and shovel every penny of the income onto the bottom line. With any luck the railway will hang together until the traffic runs out, then you sell it and move on. I don't doubt that it complies with the required standards, the CP or CN main lines, it ain't, so the standards must differ and I guess that's why it's a class 2 railway.

Yes, I guess I'd be getting off topic, and insulting if I suggested that life was more valued in some countries than others. But it's a peculiar paradox because although there appears to be less desire to protect people from an accident like this in North America than in the UK,, I can guarantee that the insurance claim pay-outs for a life in the US or Canada would be far, far higher than those in the UK. Yet I feel that the kind of safety considerations that the British would impose on an operation such as this would be seen in North America as a namby-pamby, softy approach to protecting people from things which are pretty unlikely to actually happen. I guess it's the difference between the 'belt and braces' approach now applied to everything in the UK and the 'fly it by the seat of your pants' outlook which still appeals to the majority in North America. For the benefit of those who lost loved ones or property in this tragedy, something different needs to come out of it, otherwise how will anyone live in Lac Megantic or any one of numerous rail-side towns knowing that they are relying, night after night, on one person never making a mistake?

As I understand it, Nantes was the regular spot where trains tied up for long periods during crew changes. If there were to be two trains there simultaneously on a frequent basis then, guess what, you need two sidings on which to park them. Safety costs. In this case 'unsafety' is going to cost a whole lot more. However, it's clear that different countries have very different standards and 'the people wanting all this security and derails' are setting an absurd standard to which North America can't aspire. Sad but fair dos - a runaway on a mainline doesn't happen very often and if you invoke the cost/benefit formula (even the one used in the UK) you probably won't potentially save enough lives to make the expense worthwhile. Nevertheless, just because it's not likely to be affordable, doesn't mean it's wrong to look at it. I'd have some sympathy for MMAR if they could show me that such safety features had been considered and dismissed on cost/benefit grounds. I wouldn't like it. I certainly wouldn't agree with it but at least I'd know that someone thought about the subject.

Don't really think I can be bothered to split hairs any further. It's a long time back now, but I think my original comments were actually related to the need to assess railways as to whether they required further investment to carry heavy new traffic flows efficiently and safely. To me, if you have to crawl hesitantly over track at negligible speed, that raises a question as to how fit that railway is to carry that traffic. However, the general view seems to be that everything on the MMAR was fine. So be it.

Did I use the words 'fundamentally unsafe' regarding track? I apologise if I did, it's not a phrase I like, nor would I intend to use it about any Canadian railway. It would be a very extreme criticism to call any railway fundamentally unsafe and I would certainly not feel competent to make such an assertion, so I apologise if it slipped in. (See also the link further back to a story suggesting that 92% of the track in Maine is inadequate to carry a 286,000lb tank car.) I do think that the circumstances in which this train was allegedly left were fundamentally unsafe, but that has nothing to do with the condition of the track or the speed limits. What I do believe - based at least partly on my following of what happened on Vancouver Island - is that there is a tendency, instead of upgrading the infrastructure to cope with the trains, to 'downgrade' the trains by reducing speeds and introducing other measures such as idler cars to cope with poor infrastructure (not just track but bridges and other structures with arrears of maintenance). And yes, I know that we have track rated from 186mph downwards. Most of our higher speed limits are related to signalling distances and systems and the lower ones to curvatures, gradients and sub-structure, not to the condition of the track itself, other than perhaps on minor freight-only branch lines. I cannot think of any where we have very heavy trains travelling at very low speeds because the track is not in an adequate state to carry them at a higher speed. Finally, surely the derailment proved that the track could NOT handle a train of that weight doing 63mph?

I think if you based your 'major new traffic flow' on a figure of 'XXX thousand tons per annum between A&B' then your risk assessment might well be that a main line already handling trains of similar weight and with capacity available would not require additional investment. Your expert advisors would need to say at what level a traffic flow reached that point - possibly new tonnage as a percentage of existing tonnage. (From what I see of MMAR, the oil trains must have been a very significant increase in the tonnage being carried.) A secondary railway with only a small number of trains and already operating at restricted speeds would require assessment as to what improvements are required. I'm sure Mike would know, but I seem to recall that when coal started to be imported through Avonmouth for Didcot power station, among the infrastructure improvements was the provision of extended loops between Swindon and Didcot. That was so that coal trains could be looped out of the way of HSTs.

I think that the issue of rail safety should be a national one . There needs to be a debate at government level and legislation to ensure that when major new traffic flows are taken on, (by any transport mode) there is adequate risk assessment and investment in infrastructure to ensure that the routes be used can be operated safely. That does NOT mean simply reducing the line speed so that poor infrastructure will last a bit longer. The lead needs to be taken by Transport Canada and there needs to be greater independent expertise brought in. That debate needs also to look at where the investment comes from, since it is unlikely that the railways will necessarily be able to source all of it. Those who benefit, including the government and the oil companies in this case, and maybe communities where there are major employment benefits, should stump up the money. A decently equipped, safe parking place for crew changes at Nantes would not have been prohibitively expensive to provide. It would certainly have been cheap compared to the costs of this tragedy - insurance payouts will in no way make up for lost lives.

So, referring to my previous posts, Nantes should have been set up to do the job, and invested in to provide the facilities necessary to stable the train safely while an extended crew change took place. Surely any risk assessment worth its salt would have indicated the necessity for modest changes to the loop, security and staff facilities so that the job could be accomplished efficiently and safely? It really isn't rocket science. And, yes, I'm certainly one Brit who is a firm believer in catch or trap points - because they work and because we learned long ago that in certain locations they are a desirable safety back-up feature. What happens next? I suspect that, after the clear-up, MMA will resume running these oil trains over this route long before the TSB Report is published. The big question will be, will they make any, or enough, improvements to ensure that the chances of such an accident are reduced in future, or will reluctance to change and a willingness to blame individuals for wider failings, rule the day?

This has certainly been an interesting discussion. As an outsider looking in, I see things which alarm me and I also see things which are the way they are because North America is very different from the UK. I also feel that the tit-for-tat arguments that 'you have accidents in the UK, too' are not relevant. Of course, no system is perfect and of course we have accidents. Many of ours, too, are often these days related to bad behaviour by motorists, but that is irrelevant in this case (none of the freight accidents to which I referred involved road vehicles). We also have a pretty good safety record and, I would say, an exceptional record for learning from our mistakes and changing and upgrading our systems accordingly. The installation of TPWS to override the effects of a SPAD being just one example. But I see standards and practices which are acceptable in North America and which I don't believe should be. I also feel that there's an attitude - even evident in some of the posts - that 'we do things our own way, we've loads of experience, mostly we get it right, and we're quite happy that we don't need to make any changes or learn from anyone else'. No safety-critical changes were even suggested in the Burlington report and I suspect that none will be after this, either. Just a tightening of the rules to try and ensure that people do what they are supposed to. To me, that means that Canadian rail safety is stuck in a rut, with TSB reports saying far more about the psychology of why human beings make mistakes, than about the technology to defend against those mistakes. I'm sorry, but I am utterly convinced that traffic increases of the kind involved here require investment in improvements to infrastructure and equipment, maybe other aspects as well - who pays, is a different issue (government, railroads, oil companies - but someone needs to). Otherwise, perhaps it IS best that investment goes into pipelines, (although that's not something I actually believe) and that railways which prove unable, for whatever reason, to carry traffic safely, should close. CHRIS LEIGH

According to my rough calculations and lousy maths: Gross weight of 76cars = 9,669tons Weight of 11 cars (allegedly the engineer pinned down 11 cars) = 1,399 tons Not clear whether loco handbrakes were on. Some reports say they were but the fact they rolled a km out of town after the train derailed, suggests that they weren't. If they were on then 400-500tons extra braked weight? Would 1,400 tons be likely to hold back 8,270 tons on a gradient? CHRIS LEIGH

I think you're right and I like your style. I am getting the sense that some rail accidents are viewed almost as inevitable in Canada. Three significant freight derailments in four weeks (all through different causes, its true, but the public just sees 'unsafe railways'). Look back at the TSB reports and you'll find two derailments of unit coal trains (2011 IIRC) six weeks apart because of broken wheels - wheels that were in an appalling state and yet one set was within acceptable standards). The concept of putting voice recorders and cameras in locomotives, following the Burlington accident report, is based entirely on the assumption that there will be more such accidents and the only way to find out what happened is to know what the crew said and did. But that will be different each time and each accident. It's the system that needs to be looked at. In that case the signals should tell the engineer WHERE he's going, NOT how fast to go. The Lac Megantic accident seems to have been a result of numerous incidents, all comparatively minor, combining together to create a catastrophe. That's not unusual. I've read dozens of accident reports (British, US and Canadian) in 50 years of railway journalism and that is a common factor in many of them. But if you can reduce the risk of those minor incidents, you take links out of the chain of events and a major disaster is not so easily created. Locomotives running round in patched up 30year old paint (on a railway that likes its red and gold) suggest to me that they aren't necessarily well maintained. In any event five old locomotives instead of one or two new(er) ones must increase your chances of trouble. More to the point though, little or nothing seems to have been done to make this railway better able to cope with this significant extra tonnage, which is likely a revenue windfall. Where were the track upgrades? Sure, trap points have been phased out on passenger lines in the UK but this is a freight line in Canada where they could do their job just fine. Furthermore, you can forget to set and lock a derail. You can't reset for the main line without setting the trap point. Yes, Canada has trouble with kids getting onto property and spraying graffiti, so you NEED to have secure places where hazardous goods trains can be stabled up in relative safety - yes, decent fences, gates, lighting, and security guards if necessary - it's only going to be one or two carefully planned places on the route. We live in dangerous times and Canada has two alleged railway terrorists in custody. Is it reasonable to expect one man to drive a complete shift at mind-numbingly low speed, hour after hour, to tie up his train at dead of night, to walk 1,000yds climbing up and down on 76 cars to screw down handbrakes and then 1,000yds back again (sometimes in VERY inclement weather) - a job which will take another hour or more? There's a lot in here that has far more to do with wringing the last ounces of profit out of a tired old railway, than with the safe efficient 21st century movement of dangerous goods. Finally, there's the PR aspect of not having an incident plan that says who talks to the press and what they say. So you add a PR disaster by having your Chief Exec first blame the Fire Brigade, then a 'non-railway person' and finally rounding on his own engineer and hanging him out to dry before he's even been charged with anything, never mind tried. It just might be that something good can come out of this tragedy if it is seen as a wake-up call. This makes interesting reading: http://www.pressherald.com/news/is-maine-on-top-of-oil-by-rail-risks_2013-07-12.html?fb_action_ids=4625639932717&fb_action_types=og.recommends&fb_source=aggregation&fb_aggregation_id=288381481237582

Yes - should have thought of that but I've always thought of HSTs as DMUs, from the days when I did the Abc books. I suppose they are locomotives even if they are usually treated as complete trains. Nevertheless I believe there are still doubts about the use of old equipment (which hasn't been rebuilt to modern standards because it doesn't run at 125mph on a busy main line railway) on this sort of scale. Running five old locomotives where one or two modern ones would do the job must increase the chances of trouble. If any one of the other four had been left running, maybe the fire wouldn't have happened? Accidents are about 'ifs'. Accident prevention is about reducing the 'ifs'. A final thought - my comments haven't been a case of 'Britain does it right" or we're better or we don't have such accidents. There but for the Grace of God, any one of us can go. I just think there are some lessons we've learned which might be worth applying, and the loops on gradients/catch points thing is certainly one of them. Probably comes from those Highland Railway runaways when their trains didn't have any continuous brakes at all. After all, if we just blame a fallible human being and do nothing else, as sure as eggs is eggs, it'll happen again. CHRIS LEIGH

This is about precautions and 'best practice'. My comments were mainly about precautions. Sure they cost in either time or money or both and that's the problem for railways which are trying to wring a profit out of lines which the Class 1s have ditched - hence the old locomotives etc. For instance, if a train is not parked on a main line - if it is shut away in a loop with trap points correctly set, it is all but impossible for it to run away on the main line. If you park your car on the highway, leave the engine running and the handbrake off, you'll probably get away with it, but you'll be much more likely to find you car in one piece if you park it on your driveway, switch off the engine and put the handbrake on. There may be people out in the sticks in the UK who don't lock their doors (I doubt there are many, after the Tony Martin affair) but if they get burgled its a pretty safe bet their insurance company will have something to say. As to the subject of old locomotives in the UK, well, we don't have many locomotives in passenger use. I think the oldest in daily use would be the Class 91s at 20+ years but much more recently rebuilt. There are a handful of old diesels used on nuclear flask traffic, again totally rebuilt and kept in first class condition. I accept that conditions in Canada are very different from the UK but I still believe any one of the provisions I mentioned in my earlier post might well have mitigated this disaster. As so often happens in major accidents, it isn't just one failing but a chain of seemingly minor failings which all come together at the wrong time. We'll never eliminate them but that doesn't mean that we should not look at changes which might help. The words "we don't do it that way - we never have" are one of the biggest dangers. CHRIS LEIGH

It would be interesting to know how many Class 2 railways are allowed one-man operation. I understand that CP and CN were refused permission for single-manning. I'm trying to imagine a long shift, driving at 15mph (or is it 25mph?) I've seen both speeds quoted as the maximum on the MMA. Hour after hour, on your own, crawling along like that, into the evening. Into the dark. Doing pretty much what you've always done, without thinking too much about it..... In addition to asking about the wisdom of single-manning, particularly in those sort of circumstances I'd be asking about a number of practices which seem to be OK in Canada, but about which I have grave doubts. 1 Leaving a train 'parked up' on the main line for an extended period. 2 Security-wise, leaving a train parked in an unsecured area (Canadian lines have no fences etc and two people were arrested recently for allegedly plotting to attack cross-border railways) 3 Dramatic increases in traffic (28,000% in oil by rail in five years) without, apparently any upgrading of some of the routes taking this extra traffic. 4 The use of old, umpteenth-hand locomotives on heavy trains of hazardous material. (Any picture of an MMA train with 5 or 6 locos will have 4 or 5 different liveries and locos that are in excess of 30 years old) 5 The lack of provision of catch or trap points on loops, even those where there is an obvious danger of vehicles running away down hill. 6 From a PR perspective, the lack of an action plan in the event of an emergency. Who is authorised to say what to the press, to prevent mis-information, conjecture and the kind of reaction which Burkhardt seems to have received. CHRIS LEIGH

Crew of one, apparently - and at 11.30pm. So, yes, I'd agree with you. The pictures of Nantes show a loop in countryside with, apparently, no habitation close by. Makes you wonder how the loco fire was even spotted?

I'm not suggesting that the transcontinental, or indeed any of the single tracks be upgraded to 100mph. I talking about the corridor where line speeds are already above 80mph yet have 15mph turnouts (Burlington accident) in some places, and where signals require split-second observance, and 'interpretation'. Where there is no segregation by direction, and trains cross from one track to another to reach station platforms or avoid freight trains (would you run a four-lane highway where buses crossed to the left to reach their stops?). Where engineers have to learn by heart dozens of different signal aspects, decide what they mean and which rules they relate to,and act, all in a few moments? And where there are proposals for more passenger trains - essential if a proper, growing passenger rail operation is to thrive. More and faster trains are the life-blood of passenger operations. Canada's problem is the reverse of Britain's: a nationally-owned passenger train operator on private tracks. We have private train operators on nationally-owned tracks. Both systems have their shortcomings, often for similar reasons. The movement of hazardous freight without passing through communities is clearly impossible, and road is no safer, witness the propane truck accidents that from time to time close The Malahat on Vancouver Island - there, rail transport would definitely be safer. However, the huge increase in oil by rail in recent years has clearly put pressure on the system and railroads will doubtless welcome the income. Do Class 2 railroads necessarily have the equipment and infrastructure to deal with this traffic? Trap points/sand drags in loops, secure stabling for unattended trains, track circuits, multi-person crews, modern motive power, etc - any one of these features would have possibly mitigated this disaster.

Yes, Mike, you're spot on. I spent lunchtime looking through MMAR photos on Railpictures.net. There are dozens of pages of them but I found only a couple of Megantic and half a dozen at Nantes. The Nantes shots show - what I assume is standard Canadian practice - no trap point at one end of the siding (loop) and I suspect its the same at the other end. I guess with locally-operated manual turnouts, a mechanism that moves two points simultaneously might be a little tough (our signalmen did it all the time, of course!) to operate. Nevertheless, what is considered essential practice in this country is often not regarded as necessary in Canada. They still allow locally-operated manual turnouts on lines used by 100mph passenger trains, where they rely on the switching crew to re-align the point for the mainline, where the RTC has no indication which way the point is set, and where the only indication to the train crew is a 15in diameter disc of rusty red metal on top of the switch stand. You're supposed to see that, maybe in the dark, in time to stop from 100mph if its set the wrong way? The government invests in shiny new passenger stations but doesn't understand what a train SERVICE means, and does nothing to update an early 20th century operating system which has been stretched beyond the limit for 60mph freight traffic, never mind 100mph passenger trains. This accident is appalling but its one of three significant freight accidents in the past month (all with different causes its true) but its part of a pattern which seems almost to accept accidents as inevitable. Neglected infrastructure, a HUGE freight fleet which defies adequate maintenance and relies on hot box detectors etc, highly complex signalling (60+ different signal aspects) and the complication of huge distances through sparsely populated country etc. Safety-wise it needs root-and-branch overhaul. A report I read yesterday shows that oil movements by rail have increased by 28,000% - yes twenty-eight thousand percent, in the past five years. Railways like the MMAR must benefit hugely from the income that brings but whether elderly second or third hand locos and Class 2 railroad infrastructure is up to the job is another question.

If 500 tons of locomotives with the handbrakes on didn't hold the train, I doubt that chocks would have helped.

Air brakes work by air pressure - the greater the pressure the greater the brake application. They do not fail safe in that respect. If a train is standing for a long period the locomotive handbrakes would be applied. According to Mr. Burkhardt all the locomotives had their handbrakes applied. In that case presumably the combination of train weight and gradient overpowered the handbrakes and the tank car handbrakes should probably have been applied as well.

Locos coupled to a single caboose would not seem to be unusual. They use a caboose as some sort of radio-car within the locomotive consist. If you check MMAR pictures on the Rail photo websites there are several pictures of the oil trains with multiple locos and a caboose up front. If emergency services shut down the engine because of fire and failed to screw down any, or sufficient, handbrakes (according to Burkhardt the lead loco handbrake was on) that would be enough to cause the runaway but it still seems strange that the locomotives held the road but the freightcars didn't - unless, of course, the speed and weight displaced a rail after the locos had passed. From the Ed Burkhardt phone recording it is quite clear that the locos DID pass right through the town and that the lead locomotive had been left idling to maintain the brakes. Someone - not a railway employee - had shut down the locomotive and the brakes leaked off, he says.

TSB photo shows locomotives on the track, apparently out in the countryside and undamaged. Did the locomotives pass through the crash site and stop out of town, or did the cars become uncoupled from the locomotives (perhaps due to the 'fire' which allegedly took place on the locomotive while standing unattended at Nantes) and then run away backwards to Lac-Megantique?

Page 24, Model Rail No. 79 May 2005. I think I was probably the first to try this. CHRIS LEIGH

The tooling allows for an unmodified example. Some of us want a version in USATC livery! CHRIS LEIGH