highpeak

Which somewhat leads to the next chapter in this sad tale: what is this going to cost? We've seen the cost in life and the soul ripped out of a community, the bills will now come due for MM&A/Rail World, and perhaps the wider rail industry. Ed Burkhardt said they had a lot of insurance, but whether the coverage limit is going to end up exceeded is hard to say. I am sure lawyers will be working out which jurisdiction will give their clients the best shot. The accident may have happened in Quebec, but Rail World's headquarters are in Chicago, MMA&A in Maine. Even if the insurance covers the liability, it's an open question as to what would happen for future coverage. And in the meantime, it would be interesting to know what MM&A's revenues look like. It might be a while before the Moosehead Sub. is open for business. Looking for human remains in a crime scene might take a while, and I would imagine the only party wanting this done quickly is the railroad. Irving can route their oil (oops, other people's oil being delivered to them) in different ways so the only thing they lose is a bit of leverage in playing different sets of railroads off against each other to get the lowest possible transport costs. Not that this relentless cost cutting has any bearing on the mess the class IIs find themselves in, you understand. I would say the odds on MM&A surviving are slim to none, and Slim was seen looking for his coat and hat. There's an interesting thread starting on railroad.net speculating on what the future might hold for the road and the Moosehead Sub http://www.railroad.net/forums/viewtopic.php?f=47&t=151119 Some sort of derail setup looks pretty inexpensive right now. Addendum: "[Quebec provincial police Inspector]Forget described the search as being like an "archeological dig," that will likely take weeks of digging through rubble, involving specialized crews." http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/story/2013/07/14/coroner-7-named-lac-megantic-coroner.html

I quoted a thread off the trainorder website that gave some information about MM&A's working practices. The territory for what they call Job 1 was from Farnham (43 miles east of Montreal) to Lac-Megantic. Job 2 is from Brownville Jct to Lac-Megantic. The operator for Job 2 was taking his rest period. It is not clear whether his train was parked already at Nantes (I have seen a reference to there already being a train in the siding at Nantes, but not clear if that was the case, if it was the train from Brownville Jct, a work train, no doubt that will emerge in the investigation as opposed to journalists/bloggers etct). Lac-Megantic is not a great place to lay a train up idling. It was traditionally in CP days a crew change point, but crew changes are not necessarily going to happen in a well-coordinated manner any more because there are too many factors against that, some that MM&A could control (track condition, reliability of motive power, number of available crew), some they can't (connections with other railroads, hours of service rules, weather conditions and so on). Laying a train up in Megantic for several hours may have involved splitting it to avoid blocking grade crossings with all the implications of that, and certainly would have led to issues with the residents with a diesel idling for any length of time (google "idling trains PAR" to see how well that goes over). There is no huge rush to get the train east. Until recently capacity issues at the refinery in St John had led to trains being occasionally laid up in a number of locations on Pan Am while they got the whole operation settled down to the right flow of crude. That seems to have been sorted out, I think Irving expanded either their reception facilities or the refinery itself. So Nantes is the choice of crew change point for a number of reasons. (If you look at a map, you'll see there is really nothing beyond Megantic until you get to Jackman or Brownville Jct. And while all of that is worth looking at and no doubt will be, the real issue is that the infrastructure at Nantes did not provide any redundancy in safety so that if the primary means of securing a train (brake systems) failed to do its job, for whatever reason, then there was no second layer of protection.

But the lesson learned was that you need to build safety into the track layout.

I think the surprise expressed at the location the train was left in is more to do with there not being an additional layer of protection in place at Nantes to prevent a runaway beyond the train's braking systems. Bitter experience in the UK (e.g., the Stairfoot accident in 1870 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stairfoot_rail_accident) led to the provision of various means of preventing runaways beyond relying on just the brakes. I agree with you that simply saying you can only leave a train on the flat more or less restricts railroading to parts of the Midwest and isn't workable. But I think there are things that can be done that would not be ruinous for the railroads and would provide a greater safety margin. As an example I found this railfan page http://www.coloradorailfan.com/sidings/sidings.asp?sub=1&s=1. When UP started using a passing siding outside Denver to park trains when the destination yard couldn't accept them, they installed a derail as a protection. I think MM&A would have avoided a world of hurt if they'd thought a bit about what they were doing and done what UP did. (And yes, I know they didn't use the siding, they left the train on the main. The principle still stands. Use whatever track is most efficient, put the protection where you are going to be parking your train.) The issue with the idea of guidelines is, I think, the potential for crew to think that following the guidelines would mean they didn't need to then carry out a test of effectiveness. I can see where having a chart to follow saves you time guessing and carrying out repeated tests till you find the right number, but it would need to be stressed that the guideline is just that. And in fact the CN chart does more or less say that. The CN rule book provided two charts to guide crews in setting handbrakes. One of them was intended for use when the train was being left on a grade. In the 2012 Hanlon accident the conductor followed the wrong guideline because he didn't realise the cut was being left on a grade. The chart he used suggested applying the handbrake on 2 cars (he actually only applied the brake on one car), the chart he should have used said 40% of the cars on a 1% grade (which was actually what the post-accident testing revealed was needed). The crew did attempt an effectiveness test, but did it by trying to shove the cut backwards up the grade. The investigation felt this was not a valid test because it didn't really put the weight of the cars on the brakes.

Miscellaneous trawlings: Irving, who were the consignees for the oil, issued a press release that as well as expressing the natural condolences made it clear that it was neither their oil nor their train http://www.irvingoil.com/newsroom/news_releases/declaration_sure_la_tragedies_de_lac_megantic/ I didn't see this detail anywhere else but on this site http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=be2_1373307541&comments=1 the Nantes fire chief is quoted thus "Nantes Fire Chief Patrick Lambert said this was the fourth time in nine years that Nantes firefighters have put out fires aboard MMA trains." I think this was part of his response to Ed Burkhardt's suggestion that somehow the fire department were responsible for the runaway when they shut the engine down."

This is a pretty heavy thread, as a brief "commercial break" I offer these two examples of the way it was on the old BAR. Both are F3s, built in 1947, bought new by the B&A, veterans of over thirty years of hard work when the pictures were taken at Northern Maine Jct near Bangor.

A CN guide as to what constitutes sufficient handbrakes from their general operating instructions suggests that on a 1.2% grade you would need handbrakes applied on 40% of the cars. The chart does not attempt to consider the weight of the cars other than to say if the weight is below 2,000 tons then an additional two brakes should be set. The chart is referenced in an accident report I have previously cited at http://www.bst-tsb.gc.ca/eng/rapports-reports/rail/2012/r12e0004/r12e0004.asp. The accident involved a cut of 13 loaded coal cars that had been left in a siding with one handbrake set. The conductor believed the 1% grade started beyond the point where the cars were left. The air bled off over the course of the next 31 hours and the cars eventually ran away, colliding with a freight train. CN subsequently installed a special derail on the siding.

And the procedure for testing the effectiveness of the handbrakes at holding the train is on page 51 of the Canadian Rail Operating Rules (CROR) available at http://www.railcan.ca/assets/images/regulations/rules/2008_03_19_CROR_TCO_093_en.pdf Rule is 112, three parts to it. MM&A may have added some other stuff such as guidelines for number of brakes to apply and so on, but the CROR is the underlying rule.

Some background on MM&A operating practices from trainorder.net: "In common with some other regionals and shortlines, MM&A doesn't assign specific trains to operating crews, but has numbered "jobs" with assigned tasks. "Job 1" is based out of Farnham QC, (43 miles south east of Montreal) and operates 132 miles east to Megantic QC (Lac Megantic). "Job 2" is based out of Brownville Jct., Maine and operates 117 west to Megantic. The operating employees at Farnham are Canadian, those in Brownville Jct. are American. There are 75 MM&A employees, 20 of which are operating employees. The one person crew concept was introduced in 2012 and has been gradually going into effect since then. "Job 1" from Farnham and "Job 2" from Brownville Jct. don't always make a close connection. Reports don't mention whether there was a "Job 2" westbound Brownville Jct-Megantic train secured somewhere near Megantic, but they do mention there was a Brownvile Jct. crew person taking rest at Megantic, and that the crude oil train would run when he was rested. The reason the train was parked at Nantes QC was to not block any public highway crossings for a prolonged period. It seems that parking the train at Nantes was a frequent occurrence. One operating practice which CP requires when a train is secured awaiting a crew is a "train status report" from the incoming crew which includes brake test status,details of roll by inspections, and details of when the train was stopped, and how many handbrakes are applied and other details which would usually be communicated between crews at a "change off location". I think it likely the MM&A requires a similar form to be completed by the incoming crew. More than the event recorder, such a form would be a key piece of evidence. That would be where the engineer in question would have documented how many handbrakes he applied. Mention was made by a Brownville Junction MM&A operating employee who had recently left the company that he was making 40% less working for his most recent employer than previous employers operating the railway. Not only were the wages lower, but he was working less frequently. He also mentioned lower track speeds since the shortlines took over which resulted in longer on duty times to accomplish his run. The Farnham engineer involved in the runaway has been working the route since 1980, hence would have worked for CP, Canadian-American and MM&A. He is in his 50's so he would have been in his 30's when CP had the route shortlined." http://www.trainorders.com/discussion/read.php?15,3125784

Maine's governor has ordered a safety review: http://www.pressherald.com/news/is-maine-on-top-of-oil-by-rail-risks_2013-07-12.html If I was in David Fink's shoes I'd be getting that report and a check up to Augusta pretty quick...

Dave, can you elaborate on that? One thing that emerged early on (in a statement made by the Nantes fire chief in response to MMA's suggestion that shutting down the engine was a cause of the accident) was that the fire chief's understanding of the brake system was flawed. I don't have the link any more, but he seemed to believe that the automatic brake would fail safe. My main interest in the scenarios you have in mind is whether or not the FD would have been able to do anything to prevent the movement of the train.

I am glad to hear that TSB will go beyond proximate causes for the accident, but frankly I would prefer to see a judicial inquiry of the kind that was done after the Dryden plane crash (which is why I referred to that in my first post). A typical inquiry into that crash would have blamed the pilot for attempting to take off with contaminated flight surfaces, harrumphed about the chain of command and communications and noted the lack of a ground power unit at Dryden. Judge Moshansky found a lot of other things to question including accepted industry practices and regulatory failures. Sound at all familiar? TSB published a report into a collision in Alberta in January 2012 (reference in post 184) that included the following risk findings: When clear instructions are not provided detailing the manner in which the hand brake effectiveness test must be conducted, there is a risk that insufficient hand brake force will be applied and uncontrolled movements will occur. When sidings are frequently used to set out cars and special derails are not installed, there is an increased risk of uncontrolled movements entering the main track, especially where sidings are located on steep grades. Applying only the minimum number of hand brakes, as set out in Section 7.12 of Canadian National's General Operating Instructions, to cars held on tracks with significant grades may not provide adequate securement. Canadian National did subsequently install a special derail (meaning it is normally locked clear of the track rather than locked in place on the rail) on the siding. Did MMA read that report? How widely read are these reports within the industry? Were any steps taken to change rules and procedures? Or are we happy to note that in North America we don't put derails on sidings and leave it at that? Chris Leigh and Mike Stationmaster have asked some pertinent questions and countervailing points have been made. One of these issues involved the age and reliability of the motive power. It is certainly true that brand new equipment of any kind can be defective, out of the box. It is also true that old equipment can be as reliable as the newest. But come on, is anybody really going to suggest that some of the roads are meticulously maintaining these engines? They are wrecks on wheels, patched up and sent out for another run. Was the equipment a direct cause of the accident? Was it an indirect cause of the accident? Here's a thought process: how seriously would anybody take a business proposal spelling out exactly what MMA did to take on this business? I realise I am being a bit abrasive and persistent with this, but 50 people have died and a town levelled in an event that in many ways can't be called an accident and is the latest in a depressing sequence of similar events, different because of location but not so much because of causes. For the rail industry's own good, it can't be business as usual.

My girlfriend who lives out in the boonies here in CT doesn't bother locking any doors on her house. Her rationale is if you want to break in, the door lock won't stop you. The pit bull might make you change your mind though.

A very good point. If you were just on the limit of the holding ability of the handbrakes the reduction in coefficient of friction might be enough to let the train move. Not relevant here, but maybe you could run into that with dew or rain?

This report into a 2012 accident involving a runaway cut of cars provides some insight into procedures expected to be followed when securing cars with handbrakes. [ur;]http://www.bst-tsb.gc.ca/eng/rapports-reports/rail/2012/r12e0004/r12e0004.asp[/url] The report also has an interesting analysis of the effective brake shoe force measured from two cars which survived the accident and an estimate that to secure the 13 loaded coal cars on the 1% grade handbrakes would have been needed on 5.1 cars. Only one car had had the handbrake applied.

I'm sure you are right regarding a workaround being used or at least some kind of "this has always been OK" short-cut procedure as opposed to the full procedure called for of apply handbrakes/test that they hold/repeat until train is secure without air. The point of the study I quoted is that you can't depend on simply setting some given number of handbrakes. The number most often mentioned here seems to be 11 cars, which from most statements by professional railroaders including Dave1905 on here does not appear to be enough. The study suggests that variations in brake rigging and exactly how tight you wound the chain up, plus variations in weight of train mean that you can't really always set x number of brakes and expect the same results. The full test procedure is the only reliable way and a "set x brakes and call it quits" approach is asking for trouble. It will be interesting to see what MMA instructed its engineers to do and what they did to check on that. But when you've done it that way and never had a problem, it becomes the daily procedure. And given that you are on your own after 11 hours of mind-numbing creeping along with a heavy train, you are no doubt ready to tie up as quickly as you can and get some sleep. In reality, it's only worked because you've always had the air as the actual restraining force on the train. And then you have some chain of events like this (and this is speculation but it's areas I'd be looking at): a locomotive that needed attention but was sent out anyway because it was felt to be good enough for another trip and there might not have been an alternative; the gamble doesn't pay off and the fuel leak gets worse resulting in a fire; the fire department has to shut the engine down (which I think will turn out to be a red herring, surely the air shouldn't have bled off that quickly? I've seen statements from railroaders to the effect you can still have an effective brake on a cut of cars several days later), a fireman inadvertently releases the air while climbing out of the cab (a post on railroad.net by a railroader suggests that's easier to do than you'd think.) And now the holes in the cheese have lined up. Ed Burkhardt said in one of his news conferences that you can't go back in time and bring Lac-Megantic and 50 people back. But you can make sure history doesn't repeat itself if you try to understand all the aspects of this accident.

This mathematical study of the problem of securing loaded tank cars on a 1% grade suggests you're going to have a hard job with hand brakes stopping a long train on a grade from moving anyway: http://ntl.bts.gov/lib/47000/47800/47846/JRC2013-2563.pdf Figure 5 seems to suggest that if you set the handbrake on all of 10 cars and placed two wheel chocks at each car there's still about a 50% chance the cut can move. The probability decreases significantly if the weight of the cars is less, or if you place 4 wheel chocks. The mathematic model takes into account coefficients of friction of brakes and chocks, efficiency of brake linkage and tension achieved in the handbrake chain. Unless I am completely misunderstanding what that study is about, Tom Harding was on a hiding to nothing.

I imagine we'll have to wait for the TSB report to shed light on matters such as the engineer's hours of duty, previous rest periods and so on. I'd also hope the report looks at why the railroad couldn't have a relief crew ready to take over at the changeover point. Penny-wise pound-foolish is a good comment, somebody on railroad.net calculated the value of the oil as in excess of $3.4 million. The reporting mark business always amused me. Everybody I ever met up in Maine took care to acknowledge the existence of "the other B&A" and then, due homage having been paid to the Boston and Albany, appropriated the mark for the Bangor and Aroostook! "The BAR" just didn't sound right for some reason.

MMA is of course responsible for the actions of their employees, so blaming the engineer for not following the rules doesn't get the railroad off the hook. The point I was trying to make is that Burkhardt is trying to paint this as Tom Harding's fault (the engineer) for doing a lousy job of laying up his train. Burkhardt isn't willing to say that maybe the company is also at fault for a few things. Such as the way they deal with crew changes, the fact that a crew change is necessary at all at Nantes, not a great place to be parking a train, why they operate with one engineer (having a second man around to lay the train up would make the job a lot easier apart from any additional safety a second pair of eyes in the cab would provide)and so on. He might have pondered the impact that reductions in the workforce and pay cuts imposed on the remaining employees might have had on morale. (One of the first actions Rail World took when they bought the railroad was a 40% pay cut.) He has no way of knowing how effective the brakes were on the cars in the train. (MMA had an accident a couple of years ago when a car ran away after the conductor set the handbrake, an investigation revealed a defect in the brake rigging that meant the handbrake was not operable.) And so on. That would be an admission of liability, not just trying to say it was the engineer's fault and we've suspended him without pay. None of the above are direct causes of the accident, but I would expect an investigation to consider contributing causes, most of which will be nothing to do with Tom Harding but quite a lot to do with Ed Burkhardt and his management.

I don't see Ed Burkhardt holding up his hand in a mea culpa, I see him pointing fingers. He just threw his engineer under the train to deflect attention from the shortcomings of his company, after trying to tell us it was the Nantes VFD that was to blame for shutting down an engine that was on fire. I'd be asking Mr. Burkhardt to explain quite why parking a heavy oil train unattended for several hours on a main running line at the top of a 1% grade a few miles outside of a town the line runs right through is a sensible or necessary operating practice in the first place. Burkhardt is a drowning man, and I suspect the fallout from this accident is going to result in a lot more than changing his recrewing procedures. Gerald is correct in saying you can't lump all class 2s together, but you can take a hard look at the history of operations up in Maine to see how we got where we are. Under Spencer Miller and Bucky Dumaine, Maine Central and Bangor and Aroostook made a decent if not spectacular living primarily off wood products for a long time. The B&A also had spuds and made money off them thanks to some creative thinking in sharing power and rolling stock to make sense of a seasonal operation. Maine Central was efficient enough to make money off fairly short hauls of low-value freight (such as clothespin blanks from Mattawamkeag to Wilton in converted hoppers, pulpwood from all over to the mills in all sorts of modified cars). So it's not like the erstwhile operators were not capable of providing service even within the constraints of tightly regulated industry. But those halcyon days (as they now seem) didn't last forever. The most spectacular change was the fairly abrupt loss of the spud traffic which went over to trucks once the federal government extended I-95 up into Aroostook County. The fact that Penn Central couldn't railroad their way out of a paper bag and lost entire trains of spuds for weeks didn't help. You could write a hefty thesis on the deindustrialisation of Maine, changes in the paper industry, the arrival of actors such as Timmy Mellon on the scene,the impact of the Staggers Act and so on and how it all got us where we are today with a much shrunken rail system that creeps around at little more than walking pace and leaves trains idling in the middle of nowhere. None of that mattered much, although the locals complain bitterly when a train is parked in their backyards for 15 hours (google "Pan Am idling trains") and the EPA gets upset when they occasionally dump hazardous material on the ground. But the game changes when you ask that system and culture to suddenly (and the growth of this oil traffic has been very rapid) handle heavy unit oil trains. Ed Burkhardt is now blaming a hapless, tired engineer for not applying enough handbrakes to hold a heavy train at the top of a 1% grade a few miles away from a town andtrying to share the blame with some volunteer firemen who had to come and put out a fire on his clapped out diesel engine. I hope the TSB goes a bit further than that and looks at the operating environment of roads like MMA.

Sobering eye-witness video of the fire at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mRb3JHsiqfA which perhaps conveys an impression of the size and intensity of the fire in a way the still photographs don't.

This site http://http://www.sdrm.org/faqs/brakes.html may help clarify the operation of air brakes. Pan Am's rule book on brakes is at http://http://www.guilfordrail.com/Bulls/Bulls2/Timetable%20and%20Rule%20Book%20Docs/PAR%20ABTH%20Rules%20121104.pdf Section 403 on page 100 details the procedure for securing trains to be left unattended. An apparently reliable local source states that there were 4 propane tankers in the yard in Lac Megantic http://http://www.pressherald.com/news/propane-suspected-in-explosions_2013-07-09.html MM&A has a less than stellar accident record, significantly worse than the industry average: "Federal Railroad Administration statistics show that in 2011, MM&A had a train accident rate of 10 accidents per million train miles throughout the company’s network, compared with a rate of 3.7 at Pan Am and a national average of 2.8 accidents per million train miles." (Bangor Daily News article, http://http://bangordailynews.com/2013/07/09/business/ten-years-of-highs-and-lows-for-montreal-maine-and-atlantic-railway/) Some of the accidents in recent years are not really the railroad's fault (a car that was being set out for repair ran away because of a fault with the brake rigging resulting in the brakes not being applied despite the actions of the conductor), others most certainly are, either various derailments resulting from poor track or a runaway trio of locomotives left with no handbrakes applied, air bled off, locomotives ran nearly a mile before colliding with a stationary train. The FRA reports make interesting reading. This is going to be an interesting accident report and I hope it will be as exhaustive in scope as the analysis of the 1989 air crash at Dryden http://http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Ontario_Flight_1363.The immediate cause of the accident appears fairly clear (air brakes were either inadvertently released during the firefighting operation or bled off as a result of shutting the unit down, insufficient handbrakes were applied to restrain the train once the air brakes were released, possible that previously applied handbrakes were released for some reason) but I think a lot of other questions about indirect factors need to be examined such as crew change procedures (is it wise to leave trains unattended for relatively long periods of time?); the relationship between poor track conditions, slow transit times and the impact on re-crewing; coordination with local fire departments (the fire chief, responding to the railroad's statement about the brakes being released by a third party, inadvertently revealed a flawed understanding of air brake systems) and the ability of a single engineer to cope with all the demands of this kind of operation, especially laying the train up at the end of his shift. Beyond the accident investigation, the stakes are quite high for a number of railroads. For instance, Pan Am is running similar traffic in Maine, bound for the same refinery, over very marginal track. They have made some progress in upgrading their infrastructure, but such a long period of deferred maintenance can't be fixed overnight. Trains creep along at 10mph due to track conditions (and faster than 10mph and you run a serious risk of derailments due to harmonic rock and roll on stick rail with lousy cross-levels on staggered joints). They had a minor derailment in Veazie last week, the fact that the tank cars involved were either carrying CO2 or fumes will likely get lost in the debate that I am sure is going to start once the tragic mess in Lac Megantic is cleaned up. Roads like MM&A and Pan Am can get away with lousy infrastructure and dodgy motive power when they are carrying newsprint, the stakes go up considerably when it's big oil trains. It will be interesting to see the politics of this play out.

I was leaning towards the NCE set up, based on some internet research and reading their manuals available on their web site. Looking at the locomotives I have, there are enough diesels that fit the period that are either already DCC fitted or at least DCC ready to get something up and running quickly. Steam would be a later addition anyway, adding a turntable and building the Bartlett roundhouse kit are going to take way longer than mucking around with a decoder!

Once again I thank the messengers though the message is not quite what I had hoped for. It seems that if I opt for DCC then my 2-8-2 will belong in the DCC-ready group rather than DCC equipped, a badly behaving big engine in a small yard is not what I'm looking for. I fully concur with JWB's point about needing to experiment. I have quite a pile of experiments in fields such as track and tend to fall prey to indecision as to which way to go. I had rather hoped this decision would be a bit more clear-cut, especially as this is quite an expensive area of the hobby. Keith's suggestion to remove all the electrickery and make it a DC engine has its appeal, but the flexibility of DCC also has its attraction, so I'll be mulling this over for a while. No huge rush as my layout only exists as doodles on paper at the moment.