Don’t walk down a steep mountain carrying a piano
Pro Publica has a very interesting piece on the way railroads have been making trains longer and longer, without doing the corresponding safety properly. Lots and lots of one or two mile trains with empty cars in front and heavy cars in back and other safety mistakes; result: lots and lots of derailments.
I’m all the more interested because as I think I’ve mentioned a few hundred times I live near the tracks, and enjoy hearing the locomotives thundering past, especially at night. Sometimes they’re especially thundery, so then you know there are four or five locomotives pulling that one train, and maybe one at the back too. When I walk on an overpass above the tracks I often stop to look at an especially long parked train; sometimes they’re so long I can’t really see the end, only a blur. The length of them has surprised me but I didn’t realize it’s an innovation…or how dangerous it is.
Trains are getting longer. Railroads are getting richer. But these “monster trains” are jumping off of tracks across America and regulators are doing little to curb the risk.
…
[T]he corporations that ran those trains had recently adopted a moneymaking strategy to move cargo faster than ever, with fewer workers, on trains that are consistently longer than at any time in history. Driven by the efficiency goals of precision scheduled railroading, companies are forgoing long-held safety precautions, such as assembling trains to distribute weight and risk or taking the proper time to inspect them, ProPublica found. Instead, their rushed workers are stringing together trains that stretch for 2 or even 3 miles, sometimes without regard for the delicate physics of keeping heavy, often combustible tanker cars from jumping off the tracks.
…
Today, the rail administration says it lacks enough evidence that long trains pose a particular risk. But ProPublica discovered it is a quandary of the agency’s own making: It doesn’t require companies to provide certain basic information after accidents — notably, the length of the train — that would allow it to assess once and for all the extent of the danger.
Ahhhh that old trick – don’t collect the data on X, so that you can truthfully say you don’t have the data to show that X is a risk. Clever.
On July 31, 2017, CSX assembled Train Q38831 in a rail yard in Chicago, destined for a city outside of Hyndman. It had five locomotives at the front and 136 cars trailing behind, about half hauling hazardous material: propane, isobutane, ethyl alcohol, phosphoric acid and molten sulfur heated to 235 degrees Fahrenheit. It was a bomb train, as some workers refer to them, given its combustible cargo. When it left the yard and traveled east, the train grew. In Lordstown, Ohio, workers added 28 cars. In New Castle, Pennsylvania, they added 14. Now the train was 2 miles long.
Engineer Donald Sager, who boarded the train on the night of Aug. 1 in Connellsville, Pennsylvania, about 50 miles west of Hyndman, was uncomfortable with it. It was, he later told federal investigators, “big and heavy and ugly.” It had 38 empty cars near the front with almost all the train’s tonnage behind them, so the empty cars would be lurching around as all that weight bore down on them. He said the train would be bucking.
Sager took the train with his conductor, James Beitzel, from the Connellsville yard at 8:28 p.m. under a clouded sky and began climbing the backside of the mountain outside Hyndman. The climb was steep and the train needed a push from an extra locomotive, which coupled onto the rear. The locomotive broke off when the bulk of the train crested the mountain, passing a sign that read: “Summit of Alleghenies, Altitude 2258.”
THE LONG, WINDING DESCENT into Hyndman is one of the steepest in all of CSX territory, and the train weighed 18,252 tons, heavier than 200 fueled and loaded Boeing 737s. An engineer on a train like that has to closely watch the speed. It’s best to operate the brakes proactively, but as the train started down the mountain, Sager’s instruments were telling him the air brakes were beginning to fail. He stopped the train at 11:36 p.m. and radioed dispatchers.
Urgh. It just does not seem like a good idea to take an 18 thousand ton train down a steep mountain. Gravity is not your friend.
It’d be easy to blame Bobb or Main for what was about to happen. But they were only following CSX policy when they set the hand brakes on this huge, heavy train and sent it rolling down the long, steep hill. A safe and proper move would have been to break the train into two at the top of the hill and drive each section down separately, said Grady Cothen, a former FRA attorney who has written a widely cited white paper on the challenges of operating longer trains.
Yes do it that way. Do it more slowly and safely.
There’s more; it’s interesting.
I did not know this, and I’m glad that you share with me an appreciation for the sound of thundering trains, which many people consider a nuisance.
Ah, trains. I admire the train enthusiasts. On a strictly rational level, I don’t quite get what makes people become obsessed by trains, but I can feel their allure on an emotional level when I see them, and even more so, on something like a visceral level, when I’m inside one or right in front of one that’s passing me.
Canada has a strange history with trains. We’re spread out so thin over such a vast area, the two cross-country tracks — the CN and CP lines — are the lifeblood of the country.
When I ran away from home as a teen it was a VIA Rail train that took me on my pilgrimage to Vancouver. I had never seen a mountain or a prairie before that trip. Never seen the ocean until the night the train arrived at the terminal and I walked along the marina (greeted by a porpoise of some kind, leaping out of the water, right out of the movies).
Later I got a job at VIA Rail (Canada’s passenger rail — our Amtrak or erstwhile British Rail, for those who aren’t familiar) and I learned that our whole passenger rail network is depenedent almost entirely on tracks that are owned by the freight rail companies, Canadian National and Canadian Pacific — CN and CP. This meant that the passenger trains were constantly late because the freight trains took priority in traffic. But it also meant frequent major delays due to derailments: the freight trains had so few safety protocols they were derailing all the time. The passenger train engineers I met at Toronto’s Union Station where I worked would joke that their freight train counterparts were lunatics with death wishes.
Upon learning that, I thought back to my runaway train trip in my teens, and how confused I was by the sight of so many tipped over, abandoned train cars, scattered alongside the tracks in the remotest parts of the Rockies and the Prairies. Then it all made sense: the freight rail company didn’t care much if a train derailed. Clear it off the tracks, get it out of the way and keep the trains running. Deal with the environmental carnage later, if at all.
What an ugly, destructive sight to see on what’s supposed to be a beautiful and environmentally friendly trip. How terrible. In my time at VIA, booking cross-country sightseeing trips for wealthy retired Germans, mostly, I wondered about all the derailed cars they’d encounter, blemishes in Canada’s most patriotic, scenic landscape. Welp, that’s the truth of it: Canada ain’t just pretty mountains and pristine lakes. We can do reckless pollution and destruction for the sake of saving a buck just like the best of them. We’re not as pretty as we like to think.
I love trains. It started in early childhood. We had a house in the country, and when I was 3 we moved to town (renting the country house) to be closer to school for my brother & sister & later me. I missed the country place terribly. We went back when I was 8 and I have a sharp memory of hearing the wail of a train one night and feeling this ocean of homecoming joy.
I once took CN from Montreal to Vancouver (then a bus or train down here [Seattle]). I remember birch trees in Ontario…endless endless birch trees. I overnighted in Winnipeg and Edmonton. Excellent adventure.
Oh, that’s beautiful.
Trains convey so much feeling. It’s welded into their nature, somehow. And they’re always a locus of nostalgia. There’s nothing like it in cars or planes. Maybe it’s the sheer mass and force of trains. Unstoppable. There’s something reassuring in that.
As for your cross-country Canada trip: wow. But it wasn’t just the birch trees that were endless, it was Ontario itself. This bloody province is half the damn trip.
In 1969 our family took a trip by CN Rail from Winnipeg to Churchill on Hudson’s Bay. It was quite a trip,and as we rolled north the trees were getting shorter and shorter. The train ran through Thompson and Le Pas, and then back eastwards again towards Churchill. By the time we reached our destination there were no trees at all. That was quite a trip, and the rumble of the steel wheels was a steady soundtrack for a day and half each way. But there were no mountains, actually few hills. “Good Mornin’ Canada, how are ya” indeed, or more appropriately the Canadian Railroad Trilogy.
It wasn’t my first train trip. There was a rail depot still in my little hometown and it was the easiest way for us to get to the Twin Cities until 1971 when the Great Northern ceased rail traffic. It wasn’t my last, either, as I took a trip from Oakland to San Diego on the Amtrak Coast Starlight in my twenties. It’s my favorite way to travel.
Trains – and specifically locomotives – speak to us physically somehow. I’ve been thinking about it a lot, since the pandemic prompted me to make my walks longer and longer and I go more often to the park on Puget Sound [Elliott Bay really, but that’s an arm of Puget Sound], which on the side opposite the water is bordered by the tracks. I always hope a train will go by; I stand on the overpass above the tracks and look at the parked trains a little north; it’s a red letter day when a train goes by when I’m on the overpass so I get to stand above it and watch. That’s all physical in some way. The rumble of the loco is magnetic. I don’t know why, but it is.
This is what it looks like:
Wo, Mike, Hudson’s Bay! I’m so envious.
@Mike,
That route to Churchill was neat to book. We sometimes accommodated moose & elk hunters who planned their hunts around the train. They’d call me up (sat at a desk in the bowels of Union Station alongside 20 other phone jockeys) and I’d schedule the train to stop in the middle of nowhere pretty much anywhere in the wilderness, at a designated kilometre mark on a certain day. We’d give them a half-hour window; we expected them to be waiting there for us along with whatever moose or stag they had killed, to be loaded into a special open-air luggage car.
There was a moose carcass passenger fare, programmed into the computer system and calculated like any other kind of passenger fare, which still gives me a good giggle.
This is all really lovely. (I work on the railways.) Please let this comment thread grow and grow.
(Ophelia, I think that you missed a word in your commentary; it was an 18 THOUSAND ton train).
I was born in London, and remember the terrifying (to a very small autistic person) noises that the steam locomotives used to make when sitting at the terminus. At the time, the rail network was so extensive that it seemed that it was possible to get within a couple of miles of anywhere at all by train. After we moved to the edge of the Greater London suburbs when I was five, my father, who grew up in a house with a railway line at the bottom of the garden (just beyond the Anderson shelter), commuted for decades, kept fit by the mile or so walk to the station every morning and evening. Later, even after Beeching’s stupid, short-sighted cuts, rail travel was still the only sensible way to commute to work in London, and, later, my older three children used to commute to their secondary schools by train.
I can still close my eyes and hear/feel the ‘ca-dunk, ca-dunk…ca-dunk, ca-dunk…’ rhythm of the bogie wheels crossing the expansion gaps in the rails, and the smell and feel of the seats in the compartment.
Oh, I’d forgotten…I once spent a few days with friends who had a house on the edge of the Greater London suburbs with, precisely, a railway line at the bottom of the garden. In Sutton, a short walk from Nonsuch Park where Elizabeth I once had a palace. I was very charmed with the train at the bottom of the garden.
@Ophelia and @artymorty
We had a great time climbing on the icebergs broken up and beached on the shore. They were as high as 20′ tall. My first time at any ocean beach, it was not the normal one. Mom and my aunt had their eyes out for any sign of polar bears, of course. Ice, on Dominion Day! I wish I had more photos, but that was back in the day when a roll of film and developing was an entire week’s allowance.
Dad was a Customs inspector, too, and he would sometimes get the railroad shift, which meant that he would be called when the Soo Line from Winnipeg was nearing the border. He would go to Noyes, which still had a depot at the time and check to see that all the manifests were correct, and that the boxcars were all sealed. I got to go with him a few times, and while the manifest part was boring, walking the line and listening to them talk about trains was a lot of fun. If it was cold we would sit inside the caboose. We often got to ride in the boxcars from Noyes to Lancaster. It wasn’t dangerous as the trains didn’t get up to full speed in that short of a run. Of course, we kids pretended to be hobos.
In more recent times, the Amtrak northern route in the US was at the mercy of the long long long oil trains coming from the Bakken oil fields of Western North Dakota, that brief period when North Dakota boomed. The demand for rail was so high that booking trips to Seattle along the northern route was nearly impossible because the oil had priority. It’s not so bad now, I’m sure, as both the pipelines and the fact that the boom has bust have cut back on the rail demand from the oil companies. (Don’t get me started on pipelines right now. Minnesota has more miles of pipeline than any non-oil producing state.)
And while we want to blame Republicans for deregulating the rail industry, it was actually Jimmy Carter who signed the Staggers act in 1980 deregulating the rails.
Climbing the icebergs! Hanging out in the caboose! What an outstanding childhood.
I see a lot of 100+ car freight trains on the CPR main line through Calgary.
When they are hopper cars for potash from Saskatchewan it seems safe to me.
When they are tanker cars for petroleum products I’m not so sure.
Is there some way I could post a picture or 2 in my comments.
I was thinking of posting my picture from the 2013 flood of a backhoe being used to keep the railway track from washing away.
If you have a link you could post that and I could post the photo(s) in your comment.
Last fall, as part of a Northern Ontario bus tour, my wife and I were on the last run of the season for the Agawa Canyon Tour Train, which runs from Sault Ste Marie up to Agawa Canyon Park, just inland a bit from the eastern end of Lake Superior. It’s four hours each way, and the landscape is spectacular. Even though it was a wet, overcast day, the colours were quite wonderful. It’s a wonderous, exhilarating duet of biology and geology with a rail line running through it. Here are a few photos that don’t do it justice:
https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/52416067876_02d2d611d2_b.jpg
https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/52416070191_e6ec110b14_b.jpg
https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/52428292903_3214eafcec_b.jpg
https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/52427774581_72a5fbf513_k.jpg
And no discussion of rail travel across Canada is complete without mentioning the 1965 National Film Board of Canada short The Railrodder, starring Buster Keaton in one of his final film roles:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=epfOOodUzHI
Aertymorty: one of my favorite movie scenes was in The Good, The Bad. and the Ugly. The bad guy.played by the epic Lee Van Cleef, asks another passenger if they were nearing Tucumcari. “But Mr. This train doesn’t stop in Tucumcari”. “This train will stop in Tucumcari” and he pulls the emergency cord, casually disembarking after the train shudders to an emergency halt.
Outback Queensland, the part where the rain never falls and the crows fly backwards to keep the dust out of their eyes, is notorious for the slow, laborious train trips, often running mixed freight and passenger trains.
On one journey, I overheard a woman arguing with the Conductor about lengthy delays, as she was on her way to the coast to give birth.
“Madam”, he said. “You should not have boarded the train in your condition”.
She glared at him, stared right into his eyes and said “I wasn’t IN this condition when I boarded the train”.
Zowie. Google turned up some spectacular photos too. I wanna go there.
Hahahahahahaha well done that woman.
Love of trains goes back at least 3 generations in my family – when my grandfather was a young teen in Hamilton ON (near Toronto), he worked after school as a “Butcher Boy”, selling newspapers and snacks. There he mastered the skill of getting on and off trains at the last minute. In the 1940s, when he (now a doctor) and my grandmother and my mother would travel by train every summer from Hamilton to San Francisco. An avid consumer of all manner of reading material, Harry always enjoyed getting off during station stops to check out the newsstands and bookstores. My mother tells me that there were frequent occasions when the train would be leaving, with her dad nowhere to be seen, but he always eventually turned up, after having hopped on just as the train was departing, and working his way up to their compartment. I have my own fond memories of a few train trips between Montreal and Toronto when I was a child, and would always pick train travel over airplane or car if I had the option. I’m not quite sure how it came about, but I have become increasingly fond of trains, whether real ones I can watch or ride, or smaller versions to assemble and operate.
(I do enjoy watching freight trains, but that article certainly gives one pause. Of course, it doesn’t have to be that way, but when have humans ever let safety be an impediment to greed?)
YNNB @16,
I have been on the Agawa trip a few times – always breathtaking. The Algoma Central Railway also used to run a “Tour of the Line” train that went past the Canyon all the way up to Hearst, where you could stay overnight then go back the next morning. It was a much rougher and less controlled train than the Canyon tour – they also made stops on request for hikers and hunters etc, and passengers were allowed to hang out in the vestibules (which made for some great photographic opportunities). When my spouse and I were last on that trip (2014 IIRC), there was a crew filming a movie about the Group of Seven, trying to identify locations around the lake based on the paintings. (My basement model railroad includes the Algoma Central and Ontario Northland railways, and has the Agawa Canyon currently under construction.)
If you like trains and have time to kill, I am sure you will love this.
The Ghan travels from Adelaide to Darwin and is named for the Afghan Cameleers who opened up the interior long before trains and trucks. Camels could go where bullocks couldn’t, and as a result, Australia now has more wild camels than anywhere in the world.
There is also a similar video for the Indian-Pacific that runs Perth to Sydney, via Adelaide.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZeI7ekl1WCU
@YNNB
Wow, those photos from the Sault line are beautiful. I’d love to experience that some time.
@Seanna #22
That’s so cool. That is a train ride I’d love to experience as well.
I love this thread! Turns out we all love trains here.
Thanks! It was a great ride, with lots of lakes and rivers along the way. Sometimes it was hard deciding which side to look out of. Even in that short distance, we could see subtle changes in the mix of trees from south to north, though that could be as much the result of greater human impacts closer to The Soo as anything biogeographic.
One of my uncles worked for Soo Line. He got to ride the trains for his job, on the caboose.
There are tracks about two blocks from where I live. Too far to hear the trains, but close enough to hear the horns. Once, near the beginning of the pandemic, I was walking near them when a train went by. I stopped and watched.
When I was a kid my paternal grandparents lived in West Chicago, IL. They’re house was half a block from a set of tracks. Us kids thought that was cool. We could hear the trains.
Anyone remember circus trains? I remember as a kid going to see the circus train as it was on some tracks heading into Milwaukee, WI. I forget if it had stopped there, or was moving slowly. There was an open field near the tracks where people had gathered to see it.
I don’t know if it’s done much these days, but when I was a kid it was not uncommon for people to turn off car engines while waiting for a train to go by. My parents did it regularly. Their reason was they weren’t going to waste gas idling while the train went by. Gas costs money.
Then there’s trying to count the cars as a train goes by at a crossing. :-)
Yes I remember circus trains! When I was an elephant keeper at the zoo and Ringling was in town the three of us went down to the station to see the elephants run from the station to Seattle Center. We parked and watched them go by then dashed ahead to watch another segment. It inspired us to get ours to run for exercise. (The train itself doesn’t play much of a role in this brief story, but it was crucial to it.) (Of course circus elephants are an outrage, and we thought so at the time, but still, since they were in town, we wanted to see them dashing through the city.) (One of us had worked for Ringling in Germany, so we got to visit with the Ringling elephant people and take them to the zoo after hours to meet our phants.)
And about shutting off car engines. EVERYONE should do that ALWAYS. It’s appalling to burn gas for no reason given what we now know.