What truly amazes me is that the NTSB has failed to recognize the raw and apparently untapped talent Bucky has of simply looking at an video of a derailment, and without every having set foot at the wreck site, can, from far away, describe in exacting detail the movement of every car involved, and explain with such total detail the how and why each car ended up where it did, even though he has collected no evidence from the site, made no measurements, was not involved in the original investigation, or examined any of the cars involved in person.
Why they don’t simply close the agency and just send videos directly to him to both explain what and how any accident happened, and to give the proper and precise solution to prevent such accident from ever happening again is beyond me…save the government a lot of money that way.
It appears that Bucky (or whatever he calls himself) is a philosophical cousin of the unlamented futuremodal, who absolutely insisted that dual-powers, Roadrailers and open access would save American railroading.
I am just somebody who sees a rising problem of exploding oil trains growing with the fast rise in crude oil traffic. So I suggest ways to solve that problem. I think solving the problem will require changing something.
Perhaps it does, but continuous hammering away at the same subject over and over without offering any practical and affordable solutions accomplishes nothing. If you had some genuine railroad credentials you would realize that. Most of your posts have been simply rewording of the previous one and looking for a different outcome. It doesn’t work that way.
Do you not think the powers that be would like to have zero derailments and accidents? They surely would, but they realize there is no such thing as perfection in any endeavor. They take safety very seriously, both for employees and the public.
My ideas are 100% practical and I have explained them in easy to understand, common sense terms.
I don’t know what you mean by “affordable.” This is a serious problem and it is not going to be solved by cheap knickknacks. I think affordable in this case is measure of what it is worth to retain the oil hauling business. Wishing, hoping, and symbolic gestures are not going to be enough. Success will only be measured by achieving results.
I don’t know if you realize this, but the collection of ideas that I am proposing are not just unproven concepts that I have come up with in a vacuum. ECP brakes, empty/loaded sensors, derailment sensors, and solid drawbars are all well-established concepts in practi
Prevention must be zero tolerance, absolute; given the nature of Bakken crude oil.
Bakken crude oil is a stratified multi constituent liquid. Its weight is such that something like 28,000 gallons are the weight limit for a 30,000 gallon tank car. Visualize the 2000 gallons as about 36 drums of 55 gallon capacity. That’s quite a bit of empty space inside a tank car. It is about 269 cubic feet.
What is the factor of cargo sloshing in the tank cars? What are the fluid dynamics for a stratified liquid such as Bakken crude? How does the distributed inertia and viscosity of Bakken crude contribute to unstable vehicle dynamics and rail/ wheel interaction? Might skin friction result in the tank due to sloshing creating localized heating, stress and failure? Are boiling liquid expanding vapor events (BLEVE) causing the derailments?
Are the braking dynamics of ordinary air brakes contributing to slosh and a series of events leading to failure? Is there an optimal speed of operation for Bakken crude? Is there a maximum number of tank cars not to be exceeded? Is the draft gear and energy absorption of the tank cars adequate for handling Bakken crude.
These are the questions must be examined.
The inherent problem with railroad tank cars is that they are stupid. That is, there are no sensors on the tank cars to identify what the cargo is doing and how it affects vehicle dynamics. Knowing what is going on n the tank is first and foremost needed.
FRA PHMSA announcement simplly dela with stupid vehicles, rail tank cars. Given the potential and reality for catastrophe smart railroad cars need to part of the problem solving.
The question you haven’t asked, or have accepted a simplistic answer for, is if all these technologies have been around for decades and have been tried at various times in various places around the world, why haven’t they been adopted by more (any) railroads or car manufacturers on a regular basis? If professional people in the industry who have access to more data and can actually research these alternatives have not adopted them there must be a reason. Railroads have adopted lots of new technology over the last 3 or 4 decades (fiber optics, solid state, new detection systems, DPU, shelf couplers, head shields, energy management systems, new truck designs, new track standards, CWR, etc., etc.) but for some reason (or reasons) have not adopted your favorite “solutions”. What that should tell you is there are barriers, downsides, consequences to those “solutions” that make them unattractive. Those are off the shelf “solutions”, until something mitigates the barriers, downsides and consequences, those “solutions” will continue to be passed over.
Why do you assume that those solutions have been permanently rejected just because they have not yet been enacted? Times change and new problems emerge that suddenly make old ideas worthwhile even though they have not found a purpose in the past. Take ECP brakes for example. That idea came to fruition in the 1990s amid fanfare and great promise. It was a solution in search of a problem, and it found many. But the various drawbacks to conventional air brakes were just not enough to tip the balance in favor of ECP when magnitude of the conversion sunk in.
But suddenly starting in 2008, the oil by rail boom began and led to a big, bold problem that appears to have no solution that the industry will accept. So this is a new problem in search of a solution. And when that happens it is natural to reconsider older solutions that could not find a problem worth solving in the past, but might be worth applying to solve this new problem.
That is not what he is saying at all. Perhaps some of your ideas have already been tried and found to be unworkable without further refinement or new technology.
You are ignoring everything that has been posted in response to you; “Two track railroad, one track mind” syndrome. It’s time for you to acknowledge that others have valid arguments. Until you can do that your posts are nothing more than trolling. Adiscussion involves both sides. You’re not listening to the other side.
That is exactly what he was saying. He said this: “If professional people in the industry who have access to more data and can actually research these alternatives have not adopted them there must be a reason.”
As opposed to the hypothetical expert who is insisting that they are.
I’ve got an idea. Rather than defend your ideas against all evidence to the contrary, why not give it a rest for say, a year. Then if any of your ideas are adopted you can come back and say “I told you so.”
Of course, if they aren’t, you are completely welcome to come back and admit failure, too.
Because at this point there is no further reason to continue the discussion. Your ideas have been aired, folks have pointed out potential shortcomings of same, and you simply reply by restating the same things over and over again.
As we’ve seen many times, you simply won’t take “no” for an answer, regardless of what others may offer.
You insist on restating your claims over and over, perhaps in hope that if you say them often enough, people will start to believe you. So far, that hasn’t happened. You should take something from that other than “people won’t listen.”
Einstein wisely noted, “Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
And so it goes with you - you throw your ideas and theories out there again and again, and again, and again.
Of course, that makes the rest of us a little crazy, as we’ve tried over and over to show you the fallacies in what you present, to no avail.