dave1905

There is usually equipment within a 6-8 hour run. Some places out in the middle of nowhere might be more. Derails are very common on industrial tracks and tracks that are used to store cars. So if a railroad is going to used a siding to store empty equipment during the off season, they will install a derail on the track (on both ends) while cars are stored. When the siding is converted back to use for meeting and passing trains, they remove the derails.

I collect rule books and an 1894 rule book has 4 or 5 pages of rules on what to do in case the train parts (breaks in two). There is even a "train parted" whistle signal given to a train approaching an interlocking. When the operator recieves that signal he tries to stop all conflicting routes and lines the parted train through the interlocking. By the 1903 rule book. when the majority of cars had knuckle couplers and air brakes, that had shrunk to just a page or two and just a handful of those rules survive to today (e.g. if your train goes in emergency protect movements on adjacent tracks).

I know I have been pushing back a lot, but that's because there are a whole bunch of wild ideas being thrown around with very little asking why or consideration of the what's really involved. Why was the train on the main track? To go into the siding with a one man crew the train would have had to stop short of the siding and the engineer get off and walk up to line the switch (and/or derail), leaving the train unmanned sitting on the main track with no handbrakes set. By driving up the main track the engineer would be with his train until he had the handbrakes set. In all likelihood, fencing in the siding would require physically moving the siding or main track (or both). That is, shifting the track, rails, ties and ballast, over a few feet. Why? Putting a fence (esepcially one with barbed wire to repel intruders) between the main track and the siding would create a dangerous close clearance situation. The tracks would have to be physically separated from the typical 13-15 feet to something closer to 18-20 feet on center. Can it be done? Sure, but I bet nobody even considered that as a barrier. Other solution: Assuming there was a way to get power to the west switch, install a power switch (and or derail) that is radio controlled, so the engineer can line the switch as he approaches the siding and pull into the siding without getting off the train. Barrier : (other than power) that solution could cost a couple hundred thousand dollars. With all the concern about the quality of track and engines, how many ties or rails would the MMA not be able to buy to install that switch apparatus? There are some other cheaper things they could have done (setting more handbrakes being one). In hind sight its an easy decision. I doubt that a shortline has a very sophisticated risk management staff (if they have one at all). It is entirely possible they didn't have any. Other questions that haven't been asked on this list : What was the MMA's testing program? US railroads are required to evaluate the performance of the crews by observation of the crews performing their duites. Woe be the class 1 operating manager who doesn't have his crew observation and testing program up to snuff. What was the Canadian equivalent of the US FRA's audit/testing record? Had the government audited the railroad hauling oil? I'm sure the TSB will wade through all of this.

Nationwide route had to be identified. Except for a few "proof of concept" areas, PTC is not in operation and has never been used in the US. It will take years to implement the system at a cost of $10 billion dollars.

On a major railroad there are numerous trains probably 10-20 at any given time parked on line without crews. Trains are parked because the customer can't take the train, maintenance is being done on the track, the train may have had a mechnical problem, the there may be a shortage of crews or locomotives, a yard may not have space to handle the train. All sorts of reasons. This doesn't include all the times a train is parked for shorter times with a crew on them (mostly to make train meets.) But if you have 5 trains of chemicals stretched out over 1000 miles of railroad destined for export by ship and the ship fails its inspection, guess what, you now have 5 trains you have to park someplace over a 1000 mile route for as long as it takes to get the ship cleaned or find a replacement ship. Happens fairly frequently. Those trains end up in sidings out on line, at or close to crew change points normally. When a big service interruption occurs (derailment on a major line, hurricanes, floods or blizzards) its possible to get 50-75, maybe even 100 trains having to be held in sidings without crews until the routes open up. When something big happens or if there is a maintenance curfew, yes trains may end up holding on the main track. On double main track territory, there are no sidings so when you hold trains, they are going to stack up on the main. Virtually all of the NA rail network is "unsecured" in the sense that pretty much only intermodal ramps are surrounded by chain link fences with barbed wire and guards at the gates. Every place else (includng some industries) are more or less "unsecured" unless you consider 3 strands of barbed wire on a right of way fence "secured". I wonder if the people wanting all this security and derails and such have tumbled to the fact that it would have to be on the main track as well as the siding. Based on what I've read on this forum there was going to be a train parked on the main track in any case. The location the train was tied down was a crew change point and there was a westbound train coming. If the eastbound train parked in the siding instead of the main, and the engineer tied up for rest, then when the westbound train showed up it would have to park on the main (because the other train was in the siding) until the engineer was rested. Any way you slice it, with a low volume operation, you risk not having a crew rested and a 50-50 shot at a train being parked on the main track.

Most places I've seen with a restriction on 286 cars it not a restriction on the track itself, but on the bridges. The track can handle the weight fine, its the loading on the bridge structures. Since the track was rated for 40 mph, I would be very supprised if the track structure (rail and ties) couldn't support 286 cars. Even some 263 lines can handle 286 loads if the train is speed restricted over the bridge/bridges to reduce the dynamic loads. If the turnout was 10 mph then it really doesn't matter whether the cars were 286 or 263 or empty, they weren't going to negoiate a train going 63 mph.

The criteria isn't "hazmat" per se, its TIH, PIH, some radioactive and some explosives (what in the US is called rail safety sensitive material or RSSM). Crude oil is not RSSM, but it is hazmat, a flammable liquid.

A line with the traffic such as the MMA would probably not meet the criteria requiring PTC to be installed if it was located in the US. And by the way, in the US, mandated rail safety improvements are predominately paid for by the railroads (such as the billions of dollars it will take to install PTC).

To actually "solve" a problem you have to get to the root cause. If the problem is how to stop a train from rolling away, then that's what you solve. Just saying don't stop the train on a grade isn't a solution because its impractical. If a rock the size of a school bus falls off a mountain and lands on the track, its going to take a day or two to remove it (and yes this happens several times a year in NA, the hazards of operating across mountain ranges). Trains will stop, some will be on grades and no they won't be manned while the rock is jackhammered and blasted out of the way. We are also going to have lines closed by blizzards, ice storms and avalanches. Its a hazard of where we operate. Trains are going to stop and be unattended on grades. Saying don't do it just creates a huge safety gap because when it does happen there isn't a way to deal with it effectively. Every time any discussion about railroad safety comes up people from the east side of the pond always want to add derails (regardless of whether the incident they are discussing could have been prevented by a derail). The thing about a derail is it creates something bad when it works. Derailing a train doesn't eliminate risk, it just makes a smaller pile. The goal is accomplish the task with creating any pile. Even if you had a derail you would still need the exact same processes for securement as you did without the securement. I am in no way endorsing whatever the MMA did or its operating practices. The whole concept of the spun off shortline was that the big railroads didn't find those routes profitable. In order to operate them the shortline is going to have to reduce costs. Typical methods are reduced crew sizes, reduced crew pay, leased locomotives (cheap leased locomotives), reduced main track speed (reduced maintenance costs). The major US railroads spend billions of dollars in new rail, new ties, new infrastructure, better communications, better safety processes. There are some risks we aren't able to engineer out yet (there are parts of the rail an ultrasonic rail defect detector can't scan, so defects there can't be detected). There are also things that we've been doing for decades because we thought they were safe that we've found really didn't increase safety at all. Giving the crews a securement chart isn't saying that you don't trust the crews, any more than giving a mechanic a chart telling him what torque to apply to bolts when assembling an engine is saying you don't trust the mechanic. Its giving them a tool, the railroad still has to trust they will use the tool to do the job right. By the way we also have pages and pages of instructions on how to build trains operating on a grade, how to place and ship hazardous materials, systems to detect errors and processes to correct those errors, plus processes figure out what caused them. Shortlines lack a lot of that infrastructure.

OMG. Y'all just don't realize the scope of what you are talking about. Saying that you would prohibit stopping a train carrying hazmat on a grade sounds really cool, but do you realize you are saying that you would prohibit stopping a train in an area twice the size of the UK? We have many lines where you are on a continuous grade for 150 miles. I just looked at one timetable for a portion of California and of the first 10 subdivisions, each between 110 and 150 miles long, over half had a continuous grade for the entire sub and the rest had over 50% of the sub on a grade. I don't know how much hazmat you carry in the UK but in the US, pretty much an general freight train will have some hazmat of some kind in it. In certain corridors, over half of a general freight train could be chemicals. That doesn't count all the unit trains of chemicals. US railroads have a 50 page or so booklet on how they are to handle hazmat already. As far as the securement charts. We used to use the "sufficient" criteria and then when we got tired of crews guessing wrong and cars rolling out of yards and sidings, we had people put actual science to it and calculate, based on tonnage and grade, how many hand brakes were required. Surprise! When the crews follow the charts, cars don't roll out. So if you prefer to let the crews guess on what sufficient means on your railroad, go for it. We have the data that giving them a chart with science behind it is safer. We'll stick with the charts.

Y'all just don't seem to be grasping the concept here. The air brakes aren't supposed to hold the train there. They aren't designed to hold the train there. They aren't intended to hold the train there. Whether the air leaked off or not should have no bearing holding the train. If the air leaked off, if the instructions had been correct and if the instructions were followed and there was no other unusual event, the air could have bled off and the train would have stayed put. It wouldn't have rolled away. If the air brakes were being used to hold the train then that is a failure in itself. What is supposed to hold the train are hand brakes. They do not bleed off.

There seem to be huge misconceptions on how NA air brakes work. I described how they work in an earlier post. The reservoir is used to supply air to pressurize the brake cylinder, but once the brakes are set, what maintains pressure in the brake cylinder is the seals on the cylinder and in the brake valve on the car. Until there is a material difference in pressure between the train line and the reservoir the cylinder and the reservoir are not connected. They are set to "fail safe". But in order to "fail safe" something has to fail. So far though I haven't read of anything where the brake system "failed". The air brake system is designed to allow the engineer to control a moving train. The train initially wasn't moving and when it did move there was no engineer on it to control it. While the train was stopped there was a different system that was designed to hold the train, the handbrakes. Much like a car has a brake system operated by the big pedal under the steering wheel and a parking brake. If you car rolls out of your garage in the middle of the night, it wasn't the brakes attached to the big pedal that failed, it was something to do with the parking brake. Either you didn't put the parking brake on, you didn't put it on hard enough, it failed, or something else happened to cause the car to move. I don't understand the statement "safety has gone backwards" since this is essentially the same system that has been in place since the 1880's. Here have been numerous improvements to speed both the application and release of the brakes but the basic methodology of how the Westinghouse air brake works has been the same for over 125 years. Nothing has gone backwards because nothing has materially changed. NA has had a consistent, uniform, comprehensive system of couplers, air brakes and safety appliances for over 100 years. A car from the 1920's would couple into a modern freight train and the air brakes would work.

The engines or an engine will be left running to maintain air on the cars. If the cars do not have air on them for more than 4 hours, a full initial terminal brake test must be performed. Also on many older engines the batteries may not be reliable enough to start a shut down engine. In the winter time, engines are kept running because NA diesels do not use anti-freeze so the engines are kept running to keep from dumping the water or freezing the block.

The way you explained this is putting the engine in reverse of the direction its moving. That means either the wheels turn in reverse (sliding the wheels and grinding them down) or turns them (and the motor) against the way they are being powered creating tremendous heat in the traction motors. The choice between damaging the motors or damaging the wheels is not a really good choice. Why not just put it in dynamic braking? As far as holding a train by putting it in reverse, that means that the force on the wheels has to balance the weight of the train. So that means putting enough power into the motors to balance the weight of the train. Pushing that much power through a motor that isn't turning will cook it off ASAP.

Bad things would happen.

I can concieve of a couple instances where shutting down the engines could, in a curious set of circumstances, cause a train that was "properly secured", to start to roll. The problem with those scenarios is it would have happened pretty fast after the FD shut down the engine and the FD would have seen the movement.

If the engine air brakes were being used to hold the train that becomes a failure of the process. NONE of the air brakes should be relied upon. The locomotives should have had handbrakes applied. The whole point is that every engine could have been shut down and every psi of air bled out of every air system on every car and locomotive and the train should still have stayed put. On some railroads, the crews are supposed to secure the train with handbrakes, then test the train by RELEASING the air brakes (on cars and engines), to make sure the handbrakes hold the train.

Its easy to determine if the handbrakes were set. The chain will be wound into the brake gear. The TSB detail pictures of the ends of the tank cars both appear to have the hand brakes set. Tampered with, that's harder to determine even if the cars weren't burned. There have been a whole bunch of red herrings in the various discussions and a whole bunch of critical things that haven't even been discussed on the various forums that the TSB will be looking at (was the slack stretched or bunched, were the handbrakes on the top or bottom end of the cut, what brake pipe reduction was made prior to setting the handbrakes, how many shoes are actually activated by the handbrake, were the air brakes released prior to the engineer leaving the train, etc.)

1. What's the big deal with parking a train on the main track.? I don't see a problem with it. Trains stop on the main track all the time. 2. Over 95% of N America is "unsecured area". Ever been to Wyoming? 3. How do you know the track hasn't been upgraded or there was anything "wrong" with the track? 4. Why would a new engine have made any difference to the outcome? Some of the newest engines made have chronic problems with fuel lines breaking. 5. Because in N American practice derails are not put on "running tracks" main tracks and sidings, only storage tracks and industrial tracks.

The pattern to me looks like it wasn't a shock wave from an "explosion', it was crude oil after all. To me it looks like the damage from the derailment was relatively small. Then the river of thousands of gallons of oil flowed down grade towards the lake through town burning everything in its path. It wasn't a blast, it was a river of fire.

Note that the handbrake appears to be set on the two tanks cars shown in the closeups (the chain is tight). An interesting comparison to note is that on one of the major US roads, on a 1% grade with 10,000 tons, it requires over 20 handbrakes to be set, on a 1.25% grade almost 30.

In Omaha we have a Marklin modeler so he has a lot of German and Austrian engines. But is several interconnected loops and not a switching layout. At the same show were a couple micro layouts, 1 to 3 square feet, two conventional loop modular layouts, a Freemo layout and one portable N scale layout. Part of it is that non-N American layouts tend to be tower or station focused, where N American layouts tend to be train crew focused. As such there is the desire to move and to go somewhere that a shunty plank doesn't satisfy. Since houses are larger here, more people build layouts in their house that are "permanent". They sink the majority of their time, money and efforts into those, so don't spend time building a traveling layout. Very little non-N American railroading is presented here, there is virtually nothing off-continent in most hobby shops (other than Thomas the Tank Engine) foreign magazines are very, very rare and relatively few people speak languages other than English or Spanish. So there is a barrier to exposure. About the only times we see European trains are in movies.

What are the big things between the rails on the switch points? Is that just part of the model switch casting?

This illustrates one of the hazards of weathering. I am not talking about the weathering job itself which is well done, but how much its weathered.. That's a PC boxcar. The PC lasted from 1968 to 1976. If the HH660 is switching, then than PC boxcar's paint would be brand new out of the paint shop. It would be the shiniest thing on the layout. If the PC engine is switching that means the paint job is less than 10 years old. Not every rail car is incredibly decrepit. At some point all railcars were bright and shiny. That can actually be used to reinforce the era of the layout. For example, leaving the PC with minimal weathering (road dust along the lower part of the car) and then more heavily weathering the NYC green car would establish the PC car is "newer" than the NYC. On the other hand if the era of the layout is the late 1970's through the 1980's, the heavily weathered PC car would fit in nicely. Sorry to be picky but I grew up in the Philadelphia area in the 1960's and 1970's. A weathering tip on dark colored hood units. You will find a "shiny" band of paint on engines between 3 and 5 feet above the walkways, feathered into the overall weathering. That's where the shoulders and sleeves of the crews walking along the sides of the engines brush away the dust on the hood. Its most noticeable on dark engines. Look for it. Once you know its there it becomes as obvious as the bow wave on a road unit. I don't model diesels now, but figure the way to model that is to put a roll/tube of tape about 4 ft above the walkway and then weather with an air brush. That should give a shiny stripe with feathered edges.

Its not a yard office, its actually an interlocking "tower", but its semi-urban and ratty (literally), Kentucky St. Tower in Memphis, TN. http://condrenrails.com/MRP/Memphis%20Towers%20&%20Junctions/Kentucky-Street.htm