Fuel can be a serious risk. A locomotive struck some rail staged in the gauge on a class 1 puncturing the fuel tank. Several thousand cubic yards of dirt had to be removed down to about 25 feet as part of the environmental remediation. It's not like the old days of railroading. No spraying diesel fuel or oil to kill the weeds and keep the dust down anymore.

Many operations have a not a single drop policy for fuel spillage during refueling.
A mitigation can be utilizing a license and bonded contractor for all equipment and locomotive fueling with a contract and insurance that holds them liable for any spillage during refueling.

https://www.trains.com/trn/news-reviews ... -warnings/
"The FRA noted that it does not regulate wayside detection systems and that its safety advisory does not carry the weight of law."

Another one.

It's not as bad, but it's embarrassing.

https://www.wlwt.com/article/clark-coun ... 0ub11vens#

Representatives of the major rail labor unions testified about two weeks ago before an Ohio House committee on transportation issues and one of the things they recommended was forcing the railroads to put detectors closer together than 15 to 20 miles, and probably federalizing the rules governing them. It's ridiculous to have standards for when to stop and inspect a train and then have a supervisor hundreds of miles away guess that it might be a false alarm and order the crew to continue to the next detector. It didn't happen that way 15 years ago, when "taking the safe course" really was the rule, and cars got set out, even if they weren't obviously really hot. NS needs to be forced to make the residents of East Palestine as whole as possible, even if they have to buy out everyone who wants to leave. They took an unnecessary chance and lost big.

I recall when detectors on the Santa Fe were fifty miles or so apart, but every indication of a problem the train stopped, and was set out to be inspected by someone from the car department, not just a brakeman with a lantern. But that was when 75 car trains, under 1 mile in length were the norm.

This incident on the UP has me a bit skeptical but apparently there is audio as proof: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/202 ... rain-crash

This may be a duplicate of an earlier reply I made to QJDrive's note of today on FRA jurisdiction. For some reason, the reply didn't get posted (maybe the moderators are looking at it before it's loosed on the world, but there shouldn't be anything in it that would hit their radar screens).

Briefly, here's how Federal rail regulation works, to the extent it's relevant to the East Palestine incident:

> The Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) is a DOT agency, and the primary agency regulating railroad safety. It would likely be the agency that would address any issues with railroad "help desks" and detectors.

> The Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA) is also a DOT agency, regulating the transportation of hazardous materials by all modes.

> The Surface Transportation Board (STB) is nominally a DOT agency, but is really an independent regulatory agency (the successor to the old Interstate Commerce Commission) regulating railroad service, rates and other economic matters (mergers, abandonments, etc.). The reason STB is relevant here is because the legal duty of a railroad to provide transportation on "reasonable request" is part of STB's governing statute (I believe it's 49 USC 11101, but don't hold me to that). The issue of whether a request for transportation is "reasonable" is an STB issue.

Not on that drift but reinforcing another - the common thread that needs to really be considered is oil fuel, whether it is steam or diesel. And this group is just as exposed as anybody with some significant volumes compared to truck or home use.

If you remember back, a certain colorado excursion operation used a 'grounded' tank car as the fuel tank, and the local fuel distributor pumped their truck, got careless, it overflowed, and went into a nearby stream upstream from a town. There was no containment around the tank car, all the excess went right into the stream. Did not go well for anybody. Lesson for all.

In another instance, a poorly-constructed fuel line under a dirt shop road between the diesel fuel tank and the equipment fill rack broke at a joint under the road, and a LOT of diesel fuel disappeared into the soil. Result, HUGE excavation of contaminated soil that the operator had to pay for immediately. Thought they could get help, the 'owner' of the property that had actually allowed that shallow pipe under the road to be built ignored it, regulatory agency was actually also the owner under state law, and the operator got hung out to dry. Did not end well at all, operator took such a cash hit they decided to leave.

It doesn't take a catastrophic incident to bring financial ruin. Neither one of these were the direct fault of the operator, but both had the same result. Neither is still there.

NS put another one on the ground while their CEO was testifying to the Senate, no hazmat, but WTH is going on there? https://www.trains.com/trn/news-reviews ... n-alabama/

Not impressed by the questions though, people not familiar with train handling shouldn't be making points about it, they really should defer to people at the FRA who do know, train brakes are hard to explain even to people with mechanical skills: https://www.trains.com/trn/news-reviews ... erailment/

As I like to relate to anyone interested in what it takes to be a Class I locomotive engineer, air brake theory was a full week of classroom training at engine school 20 years ago. Most fans however, really don't care about the particulars of that, or signal systems for that matter, only how it affects the answer to, "Is the train coming to photograph?"

The NTSB just takes forever to issue a report to the point you don't even remember the accident, but when it finally gets there they are fascinating reading.

The UP runaway coming into Cheyenne (?) that rear-ended a standing freight and killed a crewman is a case in point. (Granite Canyon).... picked up cars en-route, had not been inspected, kinked air hose about 14 cars back meant the brakes wouldn't release even in emergency, and dynamics couldn't slow it. Pure panic. But the real thing that chilled me was that the EOT didn't pick up the emergency brake signal and dump the air from the back. Since then UP added a much more robust repeater system.....and changed some default settings. See
https://www.ntsb.gov/news/press-release ... 10125.aspx

But.. But.... there's the rub. You're now dependent on these monster trains of relying on a repeater signal to the DMU or the EOT to dump the air mid- or end-train, let alone run the train smoothly. If that's delayed, or hiccups... you've got thousands of feet of train and mass that can't come to a stop under emergency. Air propagation delay is bad enough, but every accident with significant car damage and pile-ups will require an in-depth check to see if the rear end of the train ever heard anything from the front, and just how long it took. When it works right, it appears to be just about as good as ECP braking with multiple and rapid release points, but what happens if it hiccups?

This story behind a paywall looks interesting, anyone have a subscription to the WSJ? https://www.wsj.com/articles/railroads- ... _lead_pos4 WSJ is usually pro-business, but if the photo they chose (what looks like a dead line of 50 y.o. diesels with open doors and graffiti-covered boxcars) is any indication, the story may be a hack job.

As an update to what Randy said, look at the recent accident on UP at Kelso, which I understand the NTSB will not be reporting on, despite the lead locomotives and 55 loaded cars reaching well over 118mph. While I doubt any preservation railroad would be running such an overloaded consist with that number of locomotives... it's still sobering.

One of the as-yet-unrealized issues with the East Palestine wreck was that most of the visible "fire" was under the train, shielded by the wheel and the sideframe from a detector looking for what at that point may have been a locked and unrotating axle-end bearing... if indeed the bearing was still in place. This is why AAR-standardized sensor-fused detection arrays are important to develop... and why intelligent realtime analysis of the data between detection stations, not some employee sitting at a desk reading data dumps, needs to be the way trending bearing failures are tracked (and how notification is given to the crew well in advance of "it broke". This may well be as much a concern for any over-the-road excursion as it is for mostrain consists... note that neither the bearings nor the braking ability per car depend on the trainlength or operation.

This is coming from someone that hauled hazmat in his past. If the OTR industry treated hazmat like the railroads do in accidents especially major derailments like East Palestine Ohio or the more recent one in Minnesota the FMCSA our version of the FRA would shutdown the system. Then throw every single senior manager executive and dispatcher in prison weld the locks shut then feed the keys through the biggest metal shredder they could find. Instead the FRA is like no big deal. I've personally seen carriers lose their ability to haul hazmat with a single mistake when hauling class 9 materials. What's it going to take for the FRA to get serious about this problem someone having a chlorine tanker rupture in a major city or another accident similar to LaMagentic in the USA.

No investigation at all into why 7k tons of iron ore ran away hitting speeds over 110 mph before derailing. I had a cop tear my truck apart for a oil leak on the transmission. See the difference on the safety side.