Documentary by the More Perfect Union channel on why they think North America suffers from 1700 derail events a year.
The majority of which involve industrial trackage and/or a pair of trucks slipping off the rails. How many auto/truck accidents per year? How many are fender benders?
Every person/group with a youtube or twitter thinks they are the next Ken Burns.
Can’t verify their data and where they got it, but if they are looking at “everything” including the mentioned fender bender types over the past 30 years, that would still be a lot in percentage terms.
Elements of fact, elements of fiction. Propaganda
A bigger indictment of current business ethics in the entirety of the country.
Using 2018 numbers (they popped up first), the railroads have about 1 reportable derailment per billion ton-miles (if I did the math right - 1.7 trillion ton miles, 1700 derailments).
From another direction, that’s one reportable derailment per 82 miles of track.
Almost breathtaking how much they don’t comprehend, or miss entirely.
Why in tarnation do they invoke the SD&AE as if it’s a good thing, increasing competition with the Octopus and all that, when it was such an unparalleled operational disaster … including if you tried to run any modern consist on it, ignoring the disasters of climate change on maintaining it, ignoring the fun of diving through Mexico, ignoring all the curves… a much, much better approach would be to get hold of Michael Sol and take up the ‘superiority’ of the Pacific Coast Extension against the hedge-fund monopolists – but they have no comprehension of what that was, or who Sol is, or really, what makes rail lines distinctively competitive. The big thing they ought to be complaining about is removing multiple tracks suitable for directional running (to get rid of facing train derailment issues) but, again, they are clueless about what that would imply.
They need to use an index of reportable derailments involving hazmat release, which is something easily defined within limits and far short of the ‘reported cases’. For all I know, there is indeed a trend in serious derailments associated with various flavors of PSR, hedge cost-cutting, SLSF-style consolidation without common sense… etc. But it ought to be substantiated scientifically, not with at best half-truths.
It’s gonna be funny to see the NAS revisit the old chestnut about 2-man crews being ‘safer’ – there’s been no real change in the logic since it got thrown out definitively the last time. Even funnier will be just how the additional inspections called for in the legislation will actually find catastrophic bearing failures like the one in East Palestine – ask their whistleblower how you can detect it in a typical pretrip inspection, even if you roll back the abbreviated pretrip inspection that’s such a hot-button topic to certain legislators with agendas.
Of course the actua
Ovemod: Perhaps you can volunteer to give that speech to the residents of East Palestine to set them straight? Perhaps condense it for those with short attention spans?
With respect to SD&AE, one reason for keeping the line open is a back-up for the Surf Line. A major bluff failure in San Clemente or Del Mar could cause a very long shutdown of rail service to San Diego. The “all American” route of the San Diego, Cuyamaca and Eastern would have had a longer route. The branch to the Julian gold mines would have been interesting.
One significant derailment per billion ton miles - wonder how the trucking industry compares?
Since we’re promoting propaganda, here’s some from the other side.
Jeff
I think the SD&AE railroad is served in the video as an example of the amount of cost cutting modern railroad operators perform. Even though that rail ROW cost millions and was done with considerable risk and engineering, it was abandoned quickly and left behind without a whimper.
At least that is what I was gleaning from their short story.
I was wondering how bearing failure could be avoided by routine inspections; or specifically how an inspection could determine the health of a railcar bearing.
If the miles run and load carried by a bearing were measured and recorded; and if the bearing performance life was consistent with its duration known, bearings could simply be replaced when their service life had expired. However, even if the bearing life could be accurately predicted, that prediction would also be affected by conditions outside of bearing quality consistency. Such external conditions would be track surfacing, rail joints, running speed profile, and maybe even outdoor ambient temperature.
So assuming that there is no way to know when a functioning bearing should be replaced, the only way to know would be to observe the bearing to be in the process of failing, which begins with rising temperature, rising vibrations, smoke production, and melting of the bearing components and axle journal.
So may
The short answer is that it can’t. No inspector can gauge anything other than an already-ridiculously-damaged bearing in a static inspection; in fact, unless obvious heat damage at the outer race is already present, a bearing with the catastrophic damage discussed in the 1998 report (which would proceed to detectable overheat failure in 20 miles or less) would show no signs. I suspect that acoustic detectors scanning the train on both sides during a full Class I brake test leaving a yard would find very few issues that even the current spacing of lineside detectors would not have found before or after the yard…
I came to the conclusion long ago that the only suitable technology was one physically mounted on the sideframe, communicating with other systems on the car, that continually tracks bearing temperature, truck alignment, acoustic signature, and some other associated things including center and side-bearing binding. This would use a carrier on the PTC SDR equipment to transmit both telemetry and proposed reactions to developing conditions. Anything short of that is at best a political boondoggle.
The next ‘best’ solution is to have detectors spaced sufficiently closely to determine a failure trend, and this would jibe with the proposed 10-mile spacing (and extension to WILD and acoustic detection at all the detectors, which ought to be in the proposed legislation if there were anyone actually familiar with railroad practice writing it). This might still not be sufficient to recognize derailment conditions before dangerous damage or misalignment occurs… no noncontinuous system can do that effectively.
Since the East Palestine accident really qualifies as more of a black s
No one with even passing understanding of the SD&AE understands it as anything other than a Spreckels boondoggle; no one with even passing understanding of the construction and operation of the line would propose spending the money to bring the tunnels up to stable condition, let alone giving them modern stack clearances. There are far better examples they ‘could’ have used, including Soloviev’s grain train project, or for that matter why even the ‘second coming’ of the Ramsey-survey line (of 1906) or the Sam Rea line and its extension to serve the New York high-speed passenger market directly would today be highly expensive boondoggles rather than high-speed service routes.
You, me, and the fellow behind the tree all understand that the East Palestine accident was an unfortunate combination of circumstances as regards the actual derailment, and an appalling failure of common sense and professional discipline regarding the post-accident response. I have far more to say, with considerably more venom, regarding the pile-on of secret and not-so-secret agendas to capitalize on the suffering of the residents of East Palestine… and of the as-yet-unrecognized others who are going to have to deal with the aftereffects of responder stupidity. But I am waiting for the NTSB report to document exactly what happens before I give any more voice to my suspicions – as, perhaps, should you.
I note in particular the organized pile-on to try to make NS safety culture look lacking or negligent. Perhaps there are indeed aspects where it is, and I would fully expect NTSB to bring this up in specific recommendations when the report comes out. On the other hand, equating Springfield with East Palestine is almost an embarrassing stretch at this point in the investigation, and Buttegieg’s gratuitously-insulting, grandstanding letter would be appalling if it were not so sadly business-as-usual for how solution-making is conducted in this relatively truth-free age of politics.
Would you propose to remove any hazmat trains through East Palestine, as the documentary indicates Elgin and those other communities along the Fox would like to do? Then let’s push for elimination of the common-carrier requirement so these railroads can embargo specific categories of PIH and other material legally. Anything short of that would be missing an important point that in my opinion needs to be clearly and openly discussed:
That hazardous material will still need to move…more than likely in trucks-lots of trucks, which have their own hazmat issues.
No, most likely in trains – but it will be on a fully compensatory basis net of all additional “safety” costs and other concerns. That rate will likely wind up being very close, perhaps greater, than specialist hazmat road carriers (cf. Shadow’s owner’s) but it will be net of all mandates.
It will be amusing to see if the Department of Transportation attempts to compel railroads to continue transporting dangerous material through city centers. Their likely approach will be the one applied to lead-acid battery plants when the issue of pregnant employees arose – no, they couldn’t discriminate against women; no, they couldn’t require employees ‘not to get pregnant’; no, they were still on the hook for unlimited damages for any health issues involving lead. Their “recourse” was to eliminate lead exposure as a working condition…
Are you actually employed now as a Spinmeister? And then sailing on into the usual distraction of blaming Big Brother and their employees.
Great job, OM!!
All the holes in the Swiss cheese lined up. Or, for the tech minded, all the holes in the Hollerith cards lined up. As with any incident, remove one piece of the puzzle and the derailment would not have happened. We’ve been over that.
What happened afterwards is a different story. We’ll have to wait for an authoritative account of what did happen, and when.
I would submit that there was a certain amount of “the fog of war” involved. Or, as the old saw goes, when you’re up to your derriere in alligators, it’s hard to remember that your mission is to drain the swamp…
No, and no, of course.
You conveniently forget that I’ve been advocating for effective technological action to prevent accidents like this from recurring, specifically including my approval of closer detector spacing and more effective sensor fusion and tracking. I’ve also gone on record with the only type of technology that would actually catch this type of problem before catastrophe… much more of the time than existing detectors… but it remains to be seen if this gets mandated successfully as a legitimately safety-improving action.
No one but an idiot thinks any bearing-related problem short of existing massive failure could be detected by the most rigorous standing car inspection. But that’s one of the things both houses of Big Brother’s legislature seem to be pushing as a talking point.
If it is proven that NS “safety culture” is directly responsible for not satisfying the Government’s then-existing detector requirements, then you can expect me to call that spade a shovel. But as far as I can tell, this is an unfortunate (and, if we can believe the AAR, a remarkably rare) catastrophic failure occurring just at the wrong time between Federally-compliant detectors.
People are doing a fine job of spinning this up into a major disaster without any assistance from me… but, as I said, it is going to be highly interesting to learn who had the bright idea of simultaneous breach of all five vinyl-chloride tanks. THAT is the problem that turned this from a severe derailment into an ecological disaster. It appears to me that a concerted effect to pin this on NS was ‘in the works’ at a point in the investigation too early to objectively determine if that were so. I would submit that that qualifies as much worse spinmeiste