Given the recent events in Ohio, this should be on the radar of museums and such that haul freight or carry the public.

If you haul freight, what is your plan and insurance and response plan for a release and or derailment?

What are your emergency response plans?
Have you table topped scenarios with local first responders?
Do you have effective communication over your territory?
Prepared buses, or vans or second train for a derailment?
Do you have a PIO or designated public speaker?

Every operating group should have a designated point of contact for the press, not just those handling hazmat.

Once that person has been established, all crew members should be told the only answer to give to the press after an incident is, “Please contact our public relations officer and they will answer all your questions.”

To make things simple, just create an email “publicrelation@yourgroup.org” or “pr@yourgroup.org” or “press@yourgroup.com.”

Yes, a central point, hopefully someone with legal training and public speaking skills. I was lucky to receive some corporate communication training at a class 1, but was still told never speak to the press, but I was allowed to represent interests to outside public safety entities.

The email address is very important, same would be a phone number. Which perhaps could be concurrent with your crossing emergency number.

Would any of you (that frequent this forum) railroads even be allowed to carry any high threat hazard materials, anyway? I think not. If you don't have PTC, you're not allowed to transport any of those things.

With NS making noise that "the media is causing all this firestorm about us abandoning the town", they're going to make this work to their advantage.

What I envision is them (the big 4 or 5) saying "since we're forced to carry this stuff, and you're forcing us to bear the costs of cleaning up the aftermath of derailments containing this stuff, we're going to have to start charging wayyyy more per carload."
All they have to do is shift the focus to the Secretary of Transportation being gay in news reports (Fox already is), and half of the USA will be on their side demanding that the government loosen regulations, because those regulations are forcing them to pay more for diesel for their Duramax that they haul dog food in.. they can't afford to "roll coal" anymore because of these liberal restrictions on everything."


Hide and watch, lol!

Maybe you need to actually read the 2008 congressional mandate about who is required to have PTC, instead of shooting from the hip and making yourself look any more uneducated.

I've been assuming that a lot of the local's sore throats and runny noses can be traced to potential future class action law suits than they are to any physical symptoms.

Are you suggesting that half of the USA doesn't like gay people? I swear I can't beleive what people post on here.

Ummmm… That liquid stuff in the big tank under your diesel loco’s frame is hazmat. So, yeah, we carry hazmat all the time.

I think NS knows that the Electronically Controlled Pneumatic (ECP) Brakes mandate for hazmat will be put back in place, after they lobbied the previous administration to dump it before it took affect. https://www.phmsa.dot.gov/news/usdot-an ... ke-mandate Whether ECP brakes would have helped in this case is another matter, at a minimum it would mean that hazmat could no longer be handled as loose cars in long general freights, which might have helped, because the guys on the head end apparently had no idea a failed roller bearing was throwing off a river of sparks for a dozen or so miles. I also expect a new discussion about whether hot box detectors can effectively replace observers on the rear of a train (even though it probably won't go anywhere) as was stipulated when cabooses were eliminated. This stretch of line had hbd's every twenty miles or so and still didn't catch the problem in time.

The ECP brakes would not have done a thing to help the East Palestine situation. I talked to some people who have been following this closely and I think this is what happened: NS adopted a new way of dealing with defect detectors alerting for supposedly hot axle bearings. Rather than having crews stop every time they "caught" a detector to inspect their train, NS created a "Defect Detector Help Desk" in Atlanta. That desk can get real-time temperatures of the axles on a passing train from any detector on the system. When a train trips a DD, the crew calls the dispatcher and informs them. The dispatcher tells the help desk which detector alerted, and they look up how hot the indicated axle(s) are and the ambient air temperature in the area. The supervisor doing this then decides whether or not the train needs to stop and inspect their train or continue on. This is what happened twice to 32N that night with the two detectors before East Palestine.

The first one showed the bad axle was 40 degrees above the ambient temperature. The second one showed it was 103 degrees above. Both times the help desk ordered the train to keep going. The detector at East Palestine indicated the bad axle was 253 degrees above ambient air temperature. The desk then told the crew to stop and inspect their train, but the train derailed moments later. NS rolled the dice that they could do this and not have a major wreck and rolled snake eyes. Yes, it was totally management's fault and totally preventable. The only good news is that nobody was directly killed in the derailment, and it happened in a more rural area, rather than in downtown Cleveland, which it passed through about an hour earlier, or while passing The Capitol Ltd. on the same route. Hopefully this accident will be the end of the "Defect Detector Help Desk", and the beginning of standardized federal rules for defect detectors, which surprisingly have not existed up to this point.

Wow, that is a revelation, one I expect to hear MUCH more about in the coming months. One might call it an "unforced error," given what the likely result will be. I wonder if any other Class Is have such a "don't worry, keep moving" desk; regardless, it is likely to impact them all (see for example: https://www.trains.com/trn/news-reviews ... cs-merger/)

If that is really what happened then NS management who knew about this situation and the “help desk” operator should be immediately put in prison.

No defense.

The DDs would not have given the crew a defect at those 2 prior detectors. The way I think that scenario would've played out is maybe the desk called the crew after the second one and advised them that they had a bearing "trending" but not to stop.

On my former employer, the dispatcher would've called to give us the trending alert, but that instruction would've been to set the car out regardless of what we found in checking the car.

There probably isn't any parameters for bearing temperatures trending upward, but not yet above the alarm level. Except someone's gut feeling at the monitoring desk. Several railroads are testing AI, including NS, but they're still going to have to come up with some parameters. Another question I have, did the fact that the train was being slowed by the dynamics instead of an automatic set, make the derailment worse? Why require EPB if the railroads is going to require the engineer to use the dynamics all the time. Maybe blended braking like Amtrak, using both dynamics and the automatic.
Getting back to the original question, does everyone have a hazmat file with all their SDS forms in the depot?

Regardless of the braking system or systems in use, smoothly handling 141 MIXED LOADS & EMPTIES stretched out over 2 miles ain't easy.