I read this in the Toronto Star this morning
Kinda rasies an eyebrow doesn’t it!
Gordon
It would be an interesting contest; Who hates the Railroads more? The Toronto Star or Mayo Clinic?
Great quote: “When they travel too fast over crumbling rail, they become missiles, a derailment waiting to happen.”
Ther’re more goodies, too. I figure the writer must have REALLY had a bad incident with a train in his developemental years.
jonesey
It’s a journalists job to stir up fear and create paranoia amongst the population.
Kinda like Chicken Little with a typewriter.
heavy on opinion (one sided) and light on any real info…credibility factor-O
Well that was a waste of 5 minutes.
Yeah, ya never know when one of them engineers is gonna set suicidal and put the train in a NOSE DIVE…
What a hunk of hokum.
You’ll note that no miles-per-incident information was included. IIRC, a comment was made at one point in the article to the effect that traffic was up…
well it’s aboot time someone brought this to light, eh?
Well our industry doesn’t need more bad public relations. We are better off with the public that loves railroads, that can’t imagine a world without them. But once again, it’s bad news that sells newspapers.
I note that one on from CP or CN responded, or their responses were not included…and as Larry pointed out, the reporter left out the miles traveled to number of incidents figure…although I love the “If it was a air line, I would fly anymore”…absurd…every major airline has had fatal crashes, and people still fly by the thousands every day.
Ed
Yeah lets hear some statistics from this newspaper to back up it’s postion. Wonder if we could sue them for liable or slander.
Since this nonsense was in a Canadian newspaper, there is no recourse for americans against them, so just laugh![B)][:p][:o)]
I can’t quite figure out why you guys are getting so bent about this article. You cannot deny the derailment numbers, and it seems to me we’ve had more than one thread going here on the forum at one time or another about how railroads (mostly CN) are defering maintenance and laying off people. I thought the article bashed railroad management rather well.
Copied from the article:
“It was a really bad year last year, especially for main-track derailments,” says Naish. There were 215 accidents involving dangerous goods, up from 208 in 2004."
“The rising accident rate comes at a time of record profits in the industry, reaping the financial benefits of 1990s layoffs, when one-third of the rail labour force was chopped.”"
Critics — unions, environmentalists and former rail employees — believe the industry accepts derailments as the cost of doing business, that speed is more important than safety."
215 accidents in one year! That’s an average of one every 1.7 days!!! And that’s just the one’s involving hazmat! This statement indicates the rather pathetic condition of their rail systems.
The following is a conversation between a 3rd grader and his mom in Canada tonight…
“Mommy, are we going to the warehouse this weekend?”
–
Phil
We are getting our noses bent out of shape because accidents happen, that’s why they’re called accidents. I just don’t like it when people need to blame someone for things going wrong. People get hurt, waste gets spilled statistically it’s going to happen. It’s nobodies fault stop pointing fingers and just live with it. Bad things happen it’s a law of the universe. (Of course good things also happen, to everything there is an equal and opposite)