All posts by Roger Straw

Editor, owner, publisher of The Benicia Independent
Derailment, Freight trains, High Hazard Flammable Trains (HHFTs)

ANOTHER DERAILMENT: Railcar plunges from overpass to street below

Repost from The Houston Chronicle

Railcar plunges from overpass to street below

No injuries after pair of railcars tumble, but new concerns arise
By Dug Begley and Dale Lezon, June 11, 2015 11:22pm
Thursday's derailment of two train cars along Old Katy Road forced traffic to be detoured while authorities investigated and brought in crews to lift the cars back onto the tracks. Photo: Cody Duty, Staff / © 2015 Houston Chronicle
Thursday’s derailment of two train cars along Old Katy Road forced traffic to be detoured while authorities investigated and brought in crews to lift the cars back onto the tracks. Photo: Cody Duty, Staff / © 2015 Houston Chronicle

A railcar tumbled from an overpass onto a Houston street Thursday, the latest in a rising number of derailments in Harris County, which is home to a network of rail corridors carrying an increasing volume of freight, including millions of gallons of hazardous cargo.

The two cars that plunged from a bridge spanning Old Katy Road near Washington Avenue around 8:30 a.m – one of which landed on the street – were carrying soybeans and plastic pellets and caused no injuries.

But between 2 million and 6 million gallons of crude oil and other hazardous chemicals travel through the county by rail each week, some of it on the same line, according to the Department of Public Safety.

And, although rail shipments of crude have declined along with the price recently, the practice still is drawing intense scrutiny after devastating derailments elsewhere and because, in Texas, crude rides the rails with little oversight.

Officials of Kansas City Southern Railway Company, which operated the 84-car train, said the train involved in Thursday’s derailment was en route from Beaumont to Kendleton with two crew members aboard when the cars derailed.

Company spokesman C. Doniele Carlson said nine to 11 cars jumped the tracks. The other derailed cars included automobile haulers as well as boxcars loaded with freight.

Traffic on Old Katy Road was detoured while authorities investigated the accident and brought in crews and equipment to lift the railcars back onto the tracks. Trains also had to avoid the area, forcing more freight to move along the eastern and western ends of Houston on other rail lines.

Although news images showing two locomotives led some to believe two trains had collided, only one was involved in the incident, said Jeff DeGraff, a spokesman for Union Pacific Railroad, which owns the tracks. No other trains were in the vicinity.

Investigators are trying to determine what led to the accident, DeGraff said.

Along with rail traffic – which has increased since 2009 but lately dipped because of a slowdown in oil exploration – collisions and derailments are increasing. Through March 31, the latest information available, railroads reported six collisions and six derailments in Harris County, according to Federal Railroad Administration data. In the first three months of 2014, only two collisions and two derailments were reported.

Many factors can lead to rail accidents, and federal data includes some incidents that would have virtually no effect outside day-to-day railroad operations, such as minor derailments in sorting yards where railcars are transferred.

According to federal reports, of the 26 rail incidents that did not involve a highway crossing in Harris County last year, 14 were caused by equipment factors such as flaws in the tracks, signal malfunctions and faulty railcar and locomotive parts. A dozen were caused by human error.

Prior maintenance and inspection of the 1,500-foot area of track where officials believe the derailment occurred did not indicate any flaws, DeGraff said. Tracks ties – the beams on which the track lies – were replaced two years ago.

Trains are expected to carry a growing amount of cargo to and from the Houston area. Based on a 2013 report by the Houston-Galveston Area Council, tonnage of rail shipments is predicted to climb from the 2007 level of 152 million tons to 218 million tons by 2035.

Much of that growth, slowed by the economic downturn from 2008 to 2011, has resumed. More frequent and longer trains are an increasingly common sight at some crossings.

Despite the increase, researchers and local officials said they were not concerned that more trains would lead to disastrous results. Railroads are investing hundreds of millions of dollars in projects meant to move the freight and improve track conditions.

“UP is making lots of money right now, and they are investing money in their track,” said Harris County Judge Ed Emmett, chairman of the Texas Freight Advisory Committee.

Last month, Union Pacific said it had projects totaling $383 million planned to start in 2015 in Texas alone. Among them is replacement of 178,000 railroad ties in Harris, Fort Bend, Montgomery and Walker counties and new rail on three routes, including from Loop 610 and Hardy Street to near the University of Houston campus.

BNSF, based in Fort Worth, plans $223 million worth of upgrades across Texas this year.

The investment is good business, said Allan Rutter, a division head of the Texas A&M University Transportation Institute’s freight mobility program.

“Track that isn’t carrying railcars isn’t very good,” Rutter said.

Unlike highways and public transit, which many argue are strained to handle the growth in population, jobs and goods movement, railroad tracks are owned and operated by private companies.

“They are not dependent on waiting for someone to give them money,” Rutter said, referring to the political process at the federal, state and local levels that must precede highway and transit expansion.

Train crew size

Why rail companies are pushing for one-person train crews

Repost from Fortune

Why rail companies are pushing for one-person train crews

By David Z. Morris, June 11, 2015, 8:17 AM EDT
A BNSF Railway train hauls crude oil near Wolf Point, Mont. Photograph by Matthew Brown — AP
As technology advances, train crews shrink. But is safety on the line?

Most freight rail lines still operate with two-person crews, a minimum is now enshrined in labor contracts held by the United Transportation Union and the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen. But railways, citing in part the rise of automated safety systems, are pushing to change that.

“Most rail corporations would like to get rid of as many workers as possible,” says Ron Kaminkow, general secretary of Railroad Workers United, a group that opposes smaller crews. “Right now, they believe they can operate trains with a single employee.”

Both sides claim safety is their main priority, but there are clearly other motivations—unions want to preserve jobs, while railways are striving to cut labor costs.

Regulators seem to be siding with labor on the question of staffing. The Office of Management and Budget is currently reviewing a proposed Federal Railroad Administration rule that would require at last two railroad employees on a train at all times.

The move to one-person crews would be the culmination of a long process. Mirroring sectors from manufacturing to stock brokerage, technology has allowed the rail industry to shed jobs even as revenues rise. Since the 1960s, innovations including diesel engines, better radios, and wayside monitoring gear has meant less need for warm bodies. U.S. railway employment declined 3% in 2012, the most recent year for which data is available. Those changes and more, says Kaminkow, led to the standardization of two-man freight train crews in the 1990s.

But the replacement of workers by technology has coincided with a massive improvement in railway safety. According to data from George Bibel, a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of North Dakota, derailments have decreased from over 3,000 in 1980 to less than 500 in 2010. A recent Northwestern University study found similar steep declines in rail fatalities.

Nonetheless, rail workers say that reducing crews to a single operator is a step too far. The RWU argues that routine operations like attaching and detaching cars from a train would be unsafe without a team able to see surroundings.

There are more dramatic cases, such as the May 12th derailment of Amtrak 188. Though the incident is still under investigation, the National Transportation Safety Board has looked into the possibility that engineer Brandon Bostian was either distracted by his phone or incapacitated as the train hit a curve at more than twice the posted speed limit. In those scenarios, the fatal crash might have been prevented by a second engineer.

Another tragic incident occurred when a solo engineer improperly parked the train for the night above Lac-Mégantic, Quebec in 2013. It rolled into downtown Lac-Mégantic and exploded, killing 47 and destroying much of the town’s central district. That train was operated by a smaller line not subject to the labor contracts in effect for so-called Class I carriers.

Kaminkow says that freight engineers operate on unpredictable schedules, generating fatigue that can lead to this sort of mistake.

Unless and until the proposed FRA rule passes, there is no national rule on train staffing levels. U.S. states including Washington, Utah, and Iowa are considering their own rules, but these could be vulnerable to challenge under interstate commerce law.

Regardless of the FRA rule, technology will continue to erode rail jobs. With BNSF piloting a program to inspect rail using drones, track crews may shrink. And though Positive Train Control has been touted primarily as a safety measure, Kaminkow says the technology is a major step towards something more radical.

“If PTC comes online,” he says, “[Railways] will then point out that the train is basically capable of running itself.”

From there, driverless trains would be possible, at least in theory.

Crude By Rail, Derailment, Disaster compensation, Explosion, Insurance and liability, Victim compensation

Oil companies pay into compensation fund for Quebec train crash – deny further liability

Repost from The Hill

Oil companies pay into compensation fund for Quebec train crash

By Timothy Cama – 06/11/15 08:35 AM EDT
This July 16, 2013, file photo shows firefighters and workers at the crash site of a train derailment that killed 47 people in Lac-Megantic, Quebec. A watchdog from the Justice Department is looking for transparency on dollar amounts that oil companies are paying into a fund for victims of the crash. —Ryan Remiorz/Associated Press

Oil companies have contributed tens of millions of dollars toward a fund to compensate victims of a major 2013 oil train disaster in Quebec, Canada, that killed 47.

Companies like Royal Dutch Shell PLC, Marathon Oil Corp., ConocoPhillips Co. and Irving Oil Ltd. have paid into the $345 million fund, though they deny responsibility for the events on the train transporting their products, The Wall Street Journal reports.

If courts in the United States and Canada approve the oil companies’ role in the fund, the companies will be shielded from liability for any negligence they had involving the disaster in Lac-Megantic, including for failing to test the oil’s vulnerability.

The Montreal, Maine & Atlantic Railway Ltd., which ran the train that derailed and exploded, filed for bankruptcy shortly after the incident.

But its court-appointed trustee said the oil companies knew that the oil was volatile and dangerous.

The oil companies have responded that their responsibility ended when they extracted the oil.

Most of the companies that contributed to the fund declined to comment to The Wall Street Journal. Marathon Oil told the newspaper that its contribution is not an acknowledgment of liability.

The Quebec disaster led officials in both Canada and the United States to pay new attention to the use of oil trains, which has increased dramatically in recent years along with oil production in places like the Bakken shale region.

It has resulted in rules in both countries that will ban the use of the oldest tank cars for oil in the coming years, as well as speed restrictions and other operational regulations.

Some Democratic lawmakers, led by Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), have pushed for regulations limiting oil volatility in rail transport.

Canada, Climate Change, First Nation treaty rights, Fossil fuel divestment, Fossil fuels, Public Health, Tar sands crude

Scientists call for end to tar sands mining

Repost from The Guardian
[Editor: This story is also covered (with great photos) in the National Observer, “Over 100 scientists call for oil sands moratorium.”  – RS]

North American scientists call for end to tar sands mining

More than 100 US and Canadian scientists publish letter saying tar sands crude should be relegated to fuel of last resort, because it causes so much pollution
By Suzanne Goldenberg, 10 June 2015 13.14 EDT 
The Syncrude tar sand site near to Fort McMurray in Northern Alberta, Canada
The Syncrude tar sand site near to Fort McMurray in Northern Alberta, Canada | Photograph: David Levene for the Guardian

More than 100 leading US and Canadian scientists called for a halt on future mining of the tar sands, saying extraction of the carbon-heavy fuel was incompatible with fighting climate change.

In a letter published on Wednesday, the researchers said tar sands crude should be relegated to a fuel of last resort, because it causes so much more carbon pollution than conventional oil.

The letter, released two days after G7 countries committed to get off fossil fuels by the end of the century, added to growing international pressure on the Canadian government, which has championed the tar sands and is failing to meet its earlier climate goals.

“If Canada wants to participate constructively in the global effort to stop climate change, we should first stop expanding the oil sands. More growth simply shows Canada has gone rogue,” Thomas Homer-Dixon, professor of governance innovation at the University of Waterloo, said in a statement.

The researchers included a Nobel prize winner, five holders of Canada’s highest national honour, and 34 researchers honoured by Canadian and US scientific societies.

The researchers said it was the first time that scientists had come out as professionals in opposition to the tar sands. The letter offered 10 reasons for the moratorium call, ranging from extraction’s impact on local First Nations communities to destruction of boreal forests and climate change, and argued that foregoing tar sands production would not hurt the economy.

They said they hoped to present those findings to Canada’s prime minister, Stephen Harper, who has lobbied hard in Washington and European capitals for the tar sands.

“We offer a unified voice calling for a moratorium on new oil sands projects,” the scientists said in the letter.

“No new oil sands or related infrastructure projects should proceed unless consistent with an implemented plan to rapidly reduce carbon pollution, safeguard biodiversity, protect human health, and respect treaty rights.”

They said the decisions made by Canada and the US would set an important example for the international community, when it comes to fighting climate change. “The choices we make about the oil sands will reverberate globally, as other countries decide whether or how to develop their own large unconventional oil deposits,” the scientists said.

Since 2000, Canada has doubled tar sands production, and Harper has lobbied Barack Obama to approve the controversial Keystone XL pipeline, which would open up new routes to market for Alberta oil.

The crash of oil prices will likely put some future projects on hold, but are unlikely to affect current production, analysts said.

The organisers of the letter said all future projects should be shelved unless Canada put in place safeguards to protect local people and environment and prevent climate change.

“The oil sands should be one of the first fuels we decide not to develop because of its carbon intensity,” said Thomas Sisk, professor of environmental science at Northern Arizona University, and one of the organisers of the letter.

“It is among the highest emitting fuels in terms of greenhouse gas emissions … If we are trying to address the climate crisis this high carbon intensive fuel should be among the first we forego as we move to an economy based around cleaner fuels.”

Researchers including Sisk first outlined reasons for opposition to the tar sands in Nature last year.

Wednesday’s intervention deepens an emerging political and economic distinction around coal and tar sands among climate campaigners.

As a fossil fuel divestment movement moves from college campuses to financial institutions, a number of prominent supporters, such as Rockefeller Brothers Fund, moved swiftly to ditch coal and tar sands holdings, but plan more gradual moves away from oil and gas.

Scientists agree that two-thirds of known fossil fuel reserves will need to stay in the ground to avoid warming above 2C, the internationally agreed threshold on catastrophic climate change.

The Guardian supports the fossil fuel divestment campaign, and has called on two of the world’s largest health charities, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Wellcome Trust, to rid its holdings of coal, oil, and gas.