highpeak

That's the Hanlon accident I referenced many posts ago, and while it's not a carbon copy of the Megantic accident it does share some features in common and provides insight into operating rules and shortcomings. One issue was that despite being familiar with the territory the conductor believed the cars were not actually on the grade which probably contributed to the inadequate provision of handbrakes since he followed (not accurately in fact) the guidelines for level track instead of the guidelines for the grade. This supports Stationmaster's case that stating numbers of brakes to apply can be misleading. Dave1905 has a different view, and I can see having guidelines as a useful STARTING point but that should be clearly stressed in the rules and in training. The other part was the report didn't think the sufficiency test was carried out well since the crew shoved against the train (i.e., uphill) but did not try to pull the train downhill. That may be relevant to the Megantic accident, presumably the data on the recorder would give some insight into how the test was carried out in Nantes. One thing I found odd about the format of the report is that while it did a thorough job of investigation, analysis and so on, there is no section dedicated to any kind of recommendations.

Long piece on Ed Burkhardt here: http://www.pressherald.com/news/my-mission-failed-rail-chief-admits-mistakes-in-disasters-wake_2013-07-28.html [rant mode] I'll declare my prejudice right here: I have lived next door to New Haven for 30 years and I have yet to meet a Yale graduate (and I've interacted with more than a few) who had the sense to come in out of the rain. I wouldn't hire one to shuck corn. Nothing Ed Burkhardt say surprises me, it's an institutional thing. [/rant] Meanwhile, the Montreal Gazette steps back and ponders how we regulate industries: http://www.montrealgazette.com/news/Opinion+M%C3%A9gantic+disaster+caused+series+failures/8712833/story.html Of course, if we think TSB/Transport Canada (or NTSB/pick your US regulatory body) are doing a bang-up job, then it's just journalists seeking axes to grind.

I got through a couple of pages of that before deciding it added little to the discussion of the accident. It does perhaps inform where things might go after this. The impact of deteriorated right of way is relevant to the accident being discussed mostly in the way it affects the reliability of crew change points and the progression of trains across the route. If a train can safely travel at 10 mph and the operator can stay alert at such a pedestrian speed, then it really has no relevance to the problem at hand. Sure, we'd all be happier if the tracks were good for 79mph, but that isn't directly relevant. The fact that the tracks might be only class 1 is irrelevant (and nobody has determined what class the track in question was, an accident report at Jackman suggests that stretch was good for 40 mph, if I remember correctly, it was certainly better than class 1 or 2). The paint job is irrelevant except so far as it's poor PR and doesn't support the idea that MM&A was right on top of keeping everything in good shape (compare the way BAR locos looked back in the day, or Irving's locos look today, beauty isn't always just skin deep and you at least can start to form some opinions from it). The accident happened because there was no redundancy in the safety layers. You can argue till you're blue in the face about whether that's feasible in the context of North American railroading or not, but that's the truth. You rely on brakes alone (and whether that's hand brakes or air brakes and how those air or hand brakes were applied, whether Joe Hooligan came along and released them, whether Fred Fireman accidentally released them, it's all of interest to the report but not much else) and you have only one layer of safety. I am sick of hearing about the difficulties of doing anything else because of the size of the network, the number of trains, the length of passing tracks, the need to lay trains up on running lines etc etc, if you're just relying on the brakes, then pray to your god that when the crew don't secure the train properly that your next accident is in the middle of nowhere, not the middle of town. Looking ahead to the MM&A, they are almost certainly done. Ed, enjoy the rest of your retirement. Megantic, do you need a railroad? Overhead traffic can travel to St John several other ways. If you have enough need (and it sounds like there's one shipper needs a westbound connection) then the province may need to step in and do something. There's nothing much for traffic between Megantic and Brownsville, so the scrap value of the Moosehead subdivsion probably exceeds its value as a going concern. Unless Irving (the rail people, not the oil Irvings) decide they can turn a dime on that piece of road. How it all works out (unless a private concern is willing to put its money on the line) will depend on whether Maine and Quebec can see enough common interests to make it all work. But so far I haven't seen anything to suggest the regulatory or investigating bodies (and I'll cut TSB some slack because it's early days for them to be writing anything worthwhile) are looking at redundancy. Transport Canada strikes me as useful and captured as the FAA.

So clearly you would have to use a bit of intelligence when you design your infrastructure and your operating rules. I would have thought that was not beyond the wit of the railroads.

And the train would surely not have built up any great speed at that point.

"Nothing like it is ever likely to happen again." Well, that's all right then, nothing to see here, move along, no need to do anything. Tant pis pour les habitants de Lac-Megantic, c'est la vie.

I see this thread has been pinned, presumably to be some sort of repository for general information on freight cars. This could be a useful resource if enough people chip in. I mentioned earlier that methods of transporting some freight changed over the years. Pulpwood was one such category, relatively low value material, typically not traveling very far and possibly not being interchanged. I don't think any pulpwood traffic that originated on Maine Central was interchanged other than some off the Beecher Falls branch, and there was a flow of wood off the Bangor and Aroostook on to the Maine Central. Pulpwood at the originating end is an easy traffic to incorporate into a model railroad if your layout is set in an appropriate part of the country, as there was little in the way of loading machinery. They could travel in ones and twos on local freights and then be consolidated into a train to serve a paper mill. In to the 1960s pulpwood was a somewhat seasonal traffic as a lot of it was driven down rivers to the mills. The logging industry was not as mechanized and production could come to a stop in bad weather. MEC thus had a problem of feast or famine, and it made no sense to spend a lot of money on dedicated cars that would sit idle a lot of the time. In to the 60s there were plenty of old wooden cars around that could be used and which weren't going to fetch a lot in scrap, so they were modified and went into pulpwood service. Pre-war pulpwood cars were pretty disreputable looking jobs and would present a bit of a challenge to the scratch-builder: Some were a bit more substantial: (These three photos Robert C Baker Sr, my collection) Use of rivers declined in the 60s, the old cars wore out and newer ones took their place, still using deroofed boxcars, also some of the low-sided gondolas were converted as the traffic they had been used (coal, limestone) for dwindled. There was enough money in the traffic to buy some purpose-built cars to supplement the home-made jobs: Both MEC and BAR pushed the size of these racks when they asked Magor to build a batch that were 64' between the outside bulkheads. There were 200 of these cars on the MEC but the order was not repeated. The deck on these racks is not flat, it slopes in to the middle so the load stays put without any need for restraints. This of course means the pulpwood has to be cut to the correct size (4') and loaded properly. The long cars couldn't be fully loaded as the weight was too much, there are two load limit markings on the car depending on the kind of wood being loaded. Guilford stopped hauling the 4' cuts of pulpwood in 1996, so all the cars shown were redundant, some were converted for MOW use hauling scrap ties.

Meanwhile Ed Burkhardt is pondering whether to hire a fat lady with vocal talent: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-07-19/railway-weighing-viability-after-quebec-crash-chairman-says-1-.html An observer notes he passed an empty PAR oil train in Wachusett, MA. On his way to work, and on his return home he noted that there was a company employee loafing around in the cab of the lead engine. PAR has also apparently instructed employees to make sure handbrakes are set on the first 10 cars and the last 10. Source: various posts on railroad.net, accuracy cannot be vouched for.

The car behind the Southern is indeed an ex PRR X-58c, same batch as this one http://pc.smellycat.com/pics/equip/pc266211.jpg although the car in my picture was in basic all-over filth rather than anything like the PC scheme. Armed with the knowledge that it's an X-58 boxcar, a google search leads us to http://pc.smellycat.com/docs/model/boxcarm.html and that page in turn gives some references to magazines that had articles about X-58 boxcars. The tank car is WRNX 30155. WRNX is a reporting mark assigned (or it was in 1977) to Gulf Oil. My dog-eared copy of the ORER tells me that the car was one of a batch of 202 similar cars built to ICC-112A340W specification. That may seem like useless information, except a google search came up with a link to an article in Prototype Modeller on that type of car at http://www.trainlife.com/magazines/pages/777/50751/august-1978-page-23 If you want to know what all those letters and numbers mean, this is a useful link http://www.henrycoema.org/forms/ scroll down to Railroad Tank Car Marking system and you can open a pdf that decodes the specification. I hope this illustrates how some basic information such as the ORER provides, or just the reporting marks if the car belonged to a road that has a big enough following and online sites like the one I linked to, can get you the knowledge you are after. And spend a lot of enjoyable time doing, ahem, research.

Probably more info than the OP needs on this particular aspect, but Southern did have several batches of boxcars listed in the Official Railway Equipment Register as being equipped with roof hatches for bulk commodities. In the late 70s they travelled into Maine and were quite conspicuous with the weathering pattern. I'm assuming they were carrying bulk shipments not bags, the weathering pattern seems to suggest this. 32478 was part of a batch of 57 (32435-32499) in the April 1977 ORER. I always thought they would make an interesting modification to a standard car. The boxcars were outnumbered though by hoppers from both the Southern and the Sandersville RR. Perhaps more use to the OP is the info about the ORER. It's an industry publication that lists all the rolling stock a road has, describing it using standard codes e.g., XM is a boxcar, XF is a boxcar that may have a lining for use with food products and so on. The register lists dimensions. From a modelling perspective it's perhaps a bit limited (no pictures in it) but it does help with historical research. Various sources for them including reprints from the NMRA, some volumes available on CD. It's handy to have one for the period you are modelling, if for no other reason than to determine if a road still had a particular car/hadn't yet bought the car, assuming you want to get that picky.

Done properly, and I keep pointing to the Moshansky report as a model, there is a lot more visibility to a judicial inquiry. A report by an outfit like the TSB presumably ends up with some recommendations to Transport Canada that they may sit on (if the relationship between NTSB and FAA is anything to go by). Politicians can then presumably hold their hands up and say, well, it was down to the regulatory bodies, nothing to do with us etc etc. A big fat report detailing the failings of all concerned (including the regulatory bodies) is a bit better to beat politicians over the head with. But you're right. It will get ignored, nothing of significance will change. Best to stay away from railway lines, especially at the bottom of hills then.

The mix of car types and how some freight was carried changed over the years. Grain travels in covered hoppers these days, in the past it travelled in boxcars, the doors being sealed to allow it to be loaded. The paper industry in Maine received pulpwood and kaolin among other things. Pulpwood was often transported in old boxcars that had the roof removed and possibly the arrangement of doors altered. This was a frugal way of getting more life out of old wooden boxcars for a traffic that was somewhat seasonal in the days when wood could be dumped in a river and floated to where the mill was. When that practice ended and the pulpwood traffic became a bit more regular (and the supply of recyclable wooden boxcars dwindled), then pulpwood racks became more common. Kaolin came up from Georgia in modified boxcars, the Southern added hatches in the roof for easier loading. This was another traffic that eventually went over to hoppers, in the 70s you could see both boxcars and hoppers carrying the stuff. It's a fascinating subject as you'll see by browsing the sites D&H and Tove have linked to. For modelling purposes that trainlife site is a great resource, you can spend hours on that site

I will indeed be looking at the final report, and since the TSB exists in relationship to TC the same way the NTSB exists in relationship to the FAA I have no real confidence that the outcome will be anything useful. If the TSB report calls for meaningful change I would fully expect TC to ignore it. You can find a long list of NTSB desired changes that have been completely ignored by the regulatory bodies, I doubt Canada is any better. Look at the shameful behaviour this week of your politicians playing games in the face of an audit that said TC is not doing their job. The interim report is just a case of looking like you are doing something and misses the point completely. Yes, if you put the handbrakes on properly, you might not have this particular accident but that begs the question of what is applying the handbrakes properly. If TSB looks at their own investigations they only need to go back 18 months to find one where the crew believed they had indeed applied the handbrakes properly in line with CN and TC rules, yet you still had a runaway. You just didn't manage to incinerate a town because it was coal and in the middle of nowhere. And the crew was agile enough to get out the way without getting killed. So that's OK then. If TSB and TC learned anything from that one, there's no evidence I can see to support it. Judicial inquiry please.

If the TSB and TC are going to focus on how many handbrakes do you need and start a big debate about leaving trains unattended, then they've completely missed the point and we may as well get building pipelines. Sure, they'll spill oil but they aren't as likely to devastate a town centre. It's surely about the lack of extra layers of security, not how well you use the only layer you have, important though that is. Can't believe that's only a British thing.

If the Moosehead Subdivision were entirely within the state of Maine you might be able to see a future where the state owned the rails and selected an operator. That's what happened to quite a bit of mileage that MM&A found unremunerative. Unfortunately I don't think there are too many Maine-based shippers on the Moosehead sub. Irving oil would probably like to see it continue because it is probably the most direct route, at least for Bakken crude that originates on the CP. And from the news stories, there's at least one big shipper (relative terms here) in Megantic that needs the connection, presumably westbound. If (and that's an if of an unknown size at the moment) MM&A is financially incapable of continuing, you would think that JD Irving might be interested in expanding through one of their subsidiaries, they did scoop up some of the Aroostook lines that MM&A relinquished (probably to the chagrin on Rail World who did tender to be the designated operator after selling the track to the state). Whether the Province of Quebec would do what Maine might do, whether some sort of cross-border cooperation is possible (the economies of places like Megantic, Jackman, Brownville Jct etc really transcend national boundaries somewhat like Ozexpatriot pointed out in the Pacific Northwest a lot of posts ago) all remains to be seen. From a modelling perspective, if you are modelling a make-believe US operation and you can't come up with a back story, well....

Further layoffs in Maine: http://www.pressherald.com/news/Some-MMA-workers-in-Maine-may-face-temporary-layoffs.html It's understandable that the company would have to do this, I would think that their revenue is looking pretty meagre and will probably stay that way for a while.

I think this topic has aroused a lot of interest for a number of reasons. A primary reason is the significant difference between operating practices in North America and the UK, and we are lucky to have people like Dave1905 and Stationmaster to give us insight into those practices, other reasons are the complex interplay between all sorts of factors that led to such a tragedy. I do not for one second believe anybody is looking at this for prurient or sensational reasons. You would have to be an extraordinary person though not to have experienced an emotional reaction when you stop and consider the impact this has had on a community and on individuals like the engineer, Tom Harding, the CEO Ed Burkhardt and so on. This has been a lively but extremely courteous discussion. I've been following threads on a pilot's message board relating to a couple of recent incidents in aviation, and the level of debate has at times been like a school playground! I'll grant you this may not be of much use from a modelling perspective, but I would think it's informative for those with any interest in North American railroading.

The Honourable Virgil Moshansky took something like two years and wrote over 1,100 pages when analysing the crash of a plane at Dryden ON. I keep going back to that because I think it was a meticulous inquiry into all the contributing causes, including regulatory failures, that led to the crash. Volume III is at http://lessonslearned.faa.gov/Fokker/001301.pdf Megantic deserves (and I would argue, the rail industry needs) something similar, because the further you step back, the wider the view and the more factors come into play.

Railway Age has a short interview with Ed Burkhardt in which he refutes the suggestion that there were propane or other gas cars in the yard at Megantic: http://www.railwayage.com/index.php/safety/ed-burkhardt-talks-about-lac-megantic-with-railway-age.html There have been theories that there were smaller gas storage tanks involved in the accident rather than rail cars.

A small outfit like the MM&A might call in somebody like Hulcher http://www.hulcher.com/ if it was a big job or would take too long to get their own wreck train or other equipment to the scene.

Picure of accident train leaving Farnham: https://fbcdn-sphotos-f-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-frc3/966017_10151680821920758_706161178_o.jpg The person who posted the link on railroad.net believes that the angle of the sun/shadows suggests the photo was taken some time around noon, meaning that the engineer would be getting close to the limit of his service hours when he arrived in Nantes and laid his train up.

There are some interesting comments on handling oil trains in this thread [urlhttp://www.trainorders.com/discussion/read.php?1,946873[/url] This may be relevant to the accident in that it could affect the process of setting handbrakes, since I doubt you'd want to do it if the cars were moving due to the harmonics of the oil in the tanks.

There are a number of other routings for the oil, either all-rail or rail/barge (rail to Albany then barge). It won't go on the roads.

An FRA accident report on a derailment at Jackman (MMA car derailed due to burned off journal) on the evening of Feb 23rd this year shows the track as class 3. The speed was 5mph but that was because the train was slowing for a stop at Jackman. So not all the former Moosehead Sub is in poor shape. In CP days the line was heavily used and hosted a long distance passenger train. I would be a little concerned about security once service resumes and the first oil trains run.

While we discuss what we believe to be causes and contributing factors, the FRA is going to take a look at MM&A's "track, operations and equipment": http://bangordailynews.com/2013/07/15/news/penobscot/feds-to-inspect-montreal-maine-and-atlantic-rail-operations-in-wake-of-quebec-disaster/ To the points about what we know about whether under that weary paint lies a loco that runs like a Swiss watch, we don't know much beyond they had four fires at Nantes on locomotives that had fuel leaks over the past nine years, including the one the night of the accident (source: Nantes FD chief Patrick Lambert). We don't know which locomotives were involved beyond the crash locomotive, nor do we know if locomotives only caught fire in Nantes. I don't know if there are industry statistics for how many locomotives can be expected to catch fire in a nine year period, MM&A's record might be superior to the industry as a whole. We know that after the fire involving the locomotive the attending MM&A employee was a track worker. We do not know how far beyond track work that employee's knowledge extended or whether he was qualified to determine whether the shut down locomotive was safe and its train secured. We also know that Derby shops did work for outside customers including Rail World's European ventures (source: Atlantic Northeast Rails and Ports, December 2008) and that management viewed this as a profit center. We do not know if there were ever times when the need to complete outside work for revenue interfered with MM&A's operational requirements and maintenance. We know that MM&A has 75 employees (if a source on the trainorders site is accurate), 20 of whom are involved in operations. We do not know what procedures MM&A followed for in-service training or testing. We know that MM&A's safety record did not compare well to the industry as a whole. MM&A had an average of 38.81 accidents or incidents per million track miles between 2003 and 2012, compared to a national average of 17.15. On the main line the rate was 5.83 compared to 1.21. The trend was improving between 2006 and 2012 but saw a recent negative trend this year. (Source: just about any news outlet you care to google for in Maine/Eastern Canada). But there's a lot we don't know about the road so we should perhaps wait and see if the FRA (or the State of Maine's own review) tells us anything; the TSB report will take a while longer I would imagine.