The Trains Magazine News Wire, most every day, reports train derailments. There seems to be more derailments now than I remember reading about in the past. What is happening? Is this normal? Is it the weather? Or is the news wire more “tuned into” every event now more so than in the past?
Nick
This same thought has been running thru my mind! I know winter brings a lot of derailments, but …
Or are Nick and I just more attuned to it, since we are on the forums?
M
Slow news day…there are fewer derailments now than there used to be. You are a little more tuned-in than most. we’ve already discussed how wittless some of these grandstanding newspaper people can be. (They can turn the mundane into a Busby Berkley production in a heartbeat with politicians egging them on.)
It’s also a product of the information age - you can now find out about a derailment in Podunk, Iowa almost before the local residents do, even if you live in Maine or Australia. And that’s not the railroad press I’m talking about (this forum can be pretty quick with info), I’m talking about mainline press. If there are casualties, so much the better. CNN will have live video on the air as soon as they can get a feed. Used to be that you had to wait for the daily paper or the 6 o’clock news, if the Podunk derailment didn’t get overridden by a story about corruption at the dog pound.
When I was a kid, I saw several derailments that didn’t even make the local news in a small town. Railroad derailments weren’t news then - just a normal fact of operation. In fact, if you look at pictures of older steam locomotives, you will see a set of rerailing frogs hanging on the tender. I’ve even seen a few on early diesels. Now if they had to call out the Big Hook - that was news.
dd
Yeah, here last winter, we had a derailment in the yard. A train split the switch and a load of grain fell over. The local newspapers and (me, the railfan) and the cops were all on the scene. They had traffic blocked off in all dierections, me and a railroad employee were almost arrested for driving past a ploice roadblock…when the cop chased us down and asked the man with the Union Pacific cap on if he worked for the railroad (duh!)…we politely told him that, “yes, we do”. LOL good day, good day.
You know, I was thinking about that today.
I heard on the scanner that CN 396 not only had a heavy train, but had a 10mph slow order at the top of the hill to contend with. So, I headed over to watch.
There was half of the Gulf Coast tied to the locomotives, I counted 133 cars…the majority of those being tank cars with commondities such as vinyl chloride, sulfuric acid, and cychohexene.
As I am watching this train go by with tank car after tank car, I think to myself … he is going over a 10mph slow order, with who knows how many gallons of chemicals. I suddenly got a little nervous.
It is a heavy responsibility any transportation company has and sometimes we take safety for granted. Accidents will always happen, and this is not to minimize the accidents which recently killed or injured those in South Carolina or So Cal, but our nation’s safety record for transportation is pretty good.
Lets hope it stays that way.
ed
The realities of derailment, at least REPORTABLE derailments, is that they have become rare enough to be NEWS.
I seem to recall reading in one of Railway Age’s ‘100 Years Ago’ snippets…that the rairoads had only killed 5000 people in the previous year, of which only 1000 were railroad employees… (don’t hold me to the exact numbers, however the numbers were absolutely STAGGERING in comparision to the number of todays operations.)
Railroads today are as safe as they have ever been, like anythng else, they can be made safer still.
Like the rest of you I have been curious about the number of derailments reported. I agree part of it is the “information age,” some of it could be a slow news day. However, i agree every little derailment is not newsworthy especially if nobody is injured, nobody is evacuated because of hazmat leaks, or if little damage is done.
Two weeks ago, on Inauguration Day, Amtrak #132 derailed ashortly after leaving Washington Union Station. Its derailment blocked trains from getting to the Northeast Corridor, but that hardly made the papers. Nobody was injured although some might have been slightly shaken up. The cause, a worn switch, was found a few days later. Yeserday (Jan31) the Fox 5 - 10 PM News in Washington, DC reported a unit coal train derailed on the ex Pennsy Popes Creek secondary. There was nothing about it in the Washington Post today, February 1, and there should not have been. No hazmat spill, and no injuries were reported.