Placards - who or which department is responsible for placing them on tankers? Do they stay on the tanker whether it is full or empty or do they remove them when they are empty so as to not confuse rescue/derail workers if this happens?
We had a fatality in the city recently. Around 7:30 pm and I will assume a mixed consist moving over a grade crossing, crossing arms down, signals flashing. This car went around a vehicle waiting for the train on this side, completely under a tanker and hit two vehicles on the other side of the train. Train crew didn’t know about the accident until they were notified and by then, the train was completely out of the area.
Now…can someone explain how he got completely under a tanker and out the other side and didn’t disturb the brake lines? I can almost comprehend the going under the tanker, but there is so much busy work under those tank cars that it seems to me he should have snapped a brake line, somehow?
Shipper places the placard and receiver removes it when the car is made empty. Certain chemicals require “empty” placards because of the residue in the tank car, if the car is not cleaned by the receiver.
1: Originating shipper of the load is responsible for proper placarding.
Speed of train, speed of vehicle, length of train car and distance between its trucks, height of car body (minus cabin), driver slouched in seat, luck. But who said it didn’t disturb something under the tanker, maybe just not the brake rigging.
While I can’t speak to your first question, perhaps the answer to #2 is the car was from Munchkinland and was simply following the Yellow Brick Road…[:-^]
I have observed the location of brake pipe {lines}, on tankers often but can’t say for sure their exact location…I believe they are along the side of a tanker as opposed along the complete bottom. And, they might have been on the opposite side of the rail car to where the auto hit and was smashed down some to pass under the tank.
Sis, I’d be willing to bet that just because the car came out the other side doesn’t necessarily mean that it was unscathed. Depending on the type of braking system, there may not have been any metal brake rigging from one end of the car to the other. As for the trainline itself, it’s a steel pipe running the length of the car–not at the bottom, though I haven’t watched recently to see where it is.
I suspect that this person had to be traveling pretty fast to get completely under the train. Further, I’d suspect that the car that hit the oncoming traffic was, for all intents and purposes, driverless.
I never originated any rail shipments, but I originated many truck and a few air shipments. There may be a few differences in practice for rail shipments, but the basics are the same. The shipper makes sure that the proper placards are available, and that the bill of lading describes every hazardous material properly (the official name of each material must be on the bill) so that the emergency response team (may it never be called) will know just what they are dealing with and thus how to handle it. The carrier’s agent must know what the bill of lading has on it, and make certain that the proper placards are on the proper places on the car.
For “empties” (it is not truly empty until it is cleaned, particularly in the case of a gas container), if it had contained an inhalation hazard of either Zone A or Zone B (Zone A kills quickly; Zone B is only slightly slower), there must be the same placard it carried when loaded no matter how little may remain. Railway Man, I never saw anything of an “empty” placard in the Government’s instructions; is this something new in the last two years?
Two interesting situations when I was handling incoming chemicals: A driver did not read his bill of lading carefully, and the loader did not tell him that he had flammable liquid along with corrosives and hydrogen peroxide nor make certain he had the proper placards–and he came over a route that was forbidden to any transport with flammable liquids. He was properly placarded for corrosives and oxidizers, but had no flammable placard. He did arrive safely. The second incident came about because the originator had marked the bill of lading as having hazardous material–and there was no hazardous material on board. This driver also did not read the bill carefully, and, when he was stopped at a state line, was quite uppity with the inspector who took him to task for not having placards wh
The Code of Federal Regulations (CFR), Title 49, Hazardous Materials Regulations of the Department of Transportation, Section 174.69, “Removal of Placards and Car Certificates After Unloading,” states, in part:
When lading requiring placards or car certificates are removedfrom a rail car other than a tank car, each placard and car certificate must be removed by the person unloading the car.
For a tank car that contained a hazardous material, the person responsible for removing the lading must assure, in accordance with the provisions of Section 172.510(c) of this subchapter, that the tank car is properly placarded for any residue thatremains in the tank car.
Section 172.510(c), “Special Placarding Provisions: Rail,” states, in part:
Each tank car containing the residue of a hazardous material must be placarded with the appropriate RESIDUE placards, as required in Section 172.525 and paragraph (a) of this section.
The RESIDUE placard must correspond to the placard that was required for the material the tank car contained when loaded, unless the tank car is reloaded with a material requiring no placards or different placards, or is sufficiently cleaned of residue and purged of vapor to remove any potential hazard.
Section 172.525, “Standard Requirements for the RESIDUE Placard,” states, in part that each RESIDUE placard must be as follows:
The triangle at the bottom of the placard must be black. The word “RESIDUE” must be white.
The midsection and upper triangle on the RESIDUE placard must be as specified in Section 172.519 and … as appropriate for the residue of the comm
I believe the CFR has been updated in regards to this.
I may be mistaken, but I don’t believe residue placards are in use any longer. A lot of what I handle on a daily basis at work is hazmat (both loaded and empty / residues) and I’ve yet to see a residue placard in the thousands (if not atleast a hundred thousand) times I’ve handled hazmat.
I’m sorry. I did not mean to imply that there was “residue” placard. The only place that the word would be found was on the bill of lading, indicating that a very small amount of whatever it was could be found in any container. I wouldn’t doubt that the CFR has been updated, since the people who have nothing to do but increase the numbers of regulations take great joy in their work. Sometimes, they actually create something good.
It used to be, back in the days before color-coded placards with commodity numbers, that placards (all white, with black lettering and red “Danger” lettering) would have a reverse side with appropriate notations for an empty car. I think that sometime after the color-coding came long, there were “residue” placards; I remember seeing them. Nowadays, though, there is no requirement to remove placards once the cars are unloaded.
No longer required to remove placards when car is empty…shipper responsible for applying correct placard…conductor responsible for checking that car and placard match when picking up…if conductor knows from train sheet car is hazmat but no placard, no pick up.
Trainsheet rules in car placement in train…if the train sheet says it is a load, and you can tell it is empty, you treat it as a load anyway.
Question 2…train crew got lucky?
Although some of the new Madzas I have seen around town just might clear a tank car…but I would concur with Carl, bet by the time it hit the other cars, it was indeed “driverless”
Remember last year the kids who stole a Jeep Cherokee and ran under a tank car in Baytown?
He managed to get all the way under, and out the other side, traveled several hundred feet before ending up in a ditch, only survivor was front seat passenger…driver and rear seat passengers decapitated…
In the accident - all they are releasing is that the driver died, and the car was in flames afterward. The people on the other side of the train escaped with minor injuries.
But as I sat and watched many tankers go by, I am going to guess that the young man was going at a high rate of speed and was driving a low profile vehicle. I still can’t believe even part of the car made it through without completely tearing up the underside of the tanker and tearing out the brake system and/or causing a derailment.
If you haven’t looked at the clearance under a tanker lately, it will be a good project the next time you are train watching.
Ed, was it at one time required that the placards (except for something like a Inhalation Hazard Zone A or B) be removed after the car was emptied? As I remarked, I never studied the section on Rail Transport since I did not need to.
The last few months that I worked, I was not certified to ship hazmat, but I still kept up and was able to advise the men who were certified. Why get recertified when you know you will retire soon, and there are others who have the responsibility?
Definitely, the conductor would not want any hazmat in his train without proper documentation and warning. Fine: $10,000 (three years ago) for each instance.
An aside: what compressed gas requires, in this country, only the green compressed gas placard even though it is an inhalation hazard (the description on the bill of lading includes “inhalation hazard”, but no zone) but requires an inhalation hazard warning in Canada?
Ammonia, although it does seem like all of the ammonia tankcars I have seen do have Inhalation Hazard stenciled on them. A few years ago, tankcars bringing in ammonia from Canada came down here. They had the corrosive gas (Division 2.4) placard on them.
I neither place nor remove placards. It’s my job to deal with incidents where the transport goes wrong. All of my training has been that the placard stays on the vehicle until it’s been suitably cleaned.
I would imagine that for cars in dedicated service (as most tank cars are), a cleaning only happens if there is a specific reason for doing so, like repairs.
The indication of “Residue” is now a part of / function of the train sheet instead of a placard.
Current rules require you go with the train sheet info in hand.
Lots of tank car are in dedicated service and never have their placards removed unless the product they carry changes, and that does not happen often.
Because they carry the same placard for years, the info as to load, empty or residue is now on the train sheet and work orders simply to save labor cost.
I have seen one residue placard, it was white with black lettering, on an old acid car, have not seen one since.
Note my avatar, I am riding a tank car placarded posion…no reason to remove the placard, the stuff is still just as dangerous if it is a residue car or a load, and if we have a accident, you would still want to know what type of posion was/had been in the car…100 gallons of residue will kill you just as fast as 100,000 gallons…first responders will treat them all as loads anyway until they can get a sequencial train sheet and decide which is really an empty and which is a load.
…Finally Ed, I understand what you are doing at the end of that tank car…For so long I’ve wondered what you had in your hand…thought it looked like a hose, and now it’s cleared up and I see it’s a hand rail…