Ed Burkhardt, chairman of the Montreal, Maine & Atlantic Railway, said Sunday night that the train’s sole engineer shut down four of the five locomotive units on the train, as is standard procedure, in the neighbouring community of Nantes before heading to Lac Mégantic to sleep. Burkhardt said the next engineer was probably due to arrive at daybreak.
But someone managed to shut down the fifth locomotive unit, he said. The railroad alleges someone tampered with the controls of the fifth engine, the one maintaining brake pressure to keep the train stopped.
“If the operating locomotive is shut down, there’s nothing left to keep the brakes charged up, and the brake pressure will drop finally to the point where they can’t be held in place any longer,” Burkhardt said.
There are two ways to shut down the fifth unit: There’s an emergency lever on the outside of the locomotive that anyone wandering by could access. Or, there are a number of levers and buttons inside the unlocked cabin.
Both means were used, said Burkhardt.
Oh dear…
It’s been bandied about that this may have been a deliberate act.
I don’t understand why they would leave any train, let alone a train hauling oil, unattended and unlocked. I don’t even leave my car unlocked. Is this standard operating procedure for all trains?
A “deliberate act” doesn’t begin to cover it:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/railway-fire-chief-dispute-details-surrounding-trains-lethal-run/article13084896/
‘The chairman of a rail company at the centre of a devastating blast is accusing firefighters of shutting down the locomotive hours before it rolled into Lac-Mégantic. Mr. Burkhardt said he believes the train’s air brakes were released because firefighters turned off the engine when they extinguished a fire a few hours before the blast.
“They went out there by themselves, shut the engine off, doused the fire. A very small fire,” he said in an interview with The Globe and Mail on Monday from Chicago.
His comments drew swift reaction from a local fire chief, who rebuffed Mr. Burkhardt’s account and promised to “clear this all up in the next few days.” ‘
Like most serious accidents, multiple things have to go wrong before disaster strikes.
But the most basic rule that has been violated? Don’t leave a loaded train sitting at the top of a steep hill, without supervision. EVER.
No excuse. The crew was just too lazy to shut down the engines and set the brakes correctly. Leaving one engine running unattended on a grade to keep brake pressure is risky and poor judgement. It would be like leaving an auto parked in reverse on a hill with the engine running to keep it from going forward. Somebody’s head should roll, but it’s likely the union will protect incompetence like usual.
A pilot can’t get through an airport terminal without getting searched for nail clippers and pouring out his morning coffee before operating a plane, but an engineer can leave his locomotive idling all night, unlocked and unattended with a ‘please f@ck with me’ lever outside the engine? Yeah, swab my headset one more time for explosives before I board.
Can’t see the forest for the trees anymore.
Yeah well, this is SOP. The Westinghouse airbrake system has been standard for about a century or so. It requires air pressure to apply and hold the brakes on. Leaving the engine running is considered safe enough with the cab locked and the key(the power control) out.
In most cases, trains or individual cars don’t roll much….this maybe the exception.
The scuttlebutt is that the local fire brigade had attended to extinguish a small fire and had shut the engine down. Whether that occurred or not…..fire brigades will be subject to a short course on railway stuff….
Perhaps a modification will be made to put engines in “park”…a positive lock….likely cheaper to keep a low-pay watchman on the engine.
Leaving Locomotives idling is standard practice as far as I’ve witnessed.
Was there a locked fence around the train? Was the train on a siding.
Who set the Locomotive fire?
Is there an anti-idleing by-law in the town? … that someone thought may apply to the federal lands a railway sits on…
Can we hang this one on the environmentalists doorstep?
While I’m pulling the crazy out tonight, I’m going to throw this one out there too…
The training pilot and experienced pilot that crashed the Boeing 777 in San Fran a couple of days ago, haven’t given any indication of how they crashed, nor of why they tried to land a 777 jet at 103 knots, which is well below what’s needed to stay in the air. What were they doing while the alarms were going on… ?
It’s California, 2 pilots together in a confined space, possibly a teacher / student sort of authority gone wrong?
Was their “a relationship” between the two? Did they have their minds on other things? sex? Just a quick one before we land?
Keep in mind, once again I mention, this occurred in California.
That design is flawed. First with any air system you always have leaks, especially with couplers. I’m a truck driver and our brakes have two ways to be activated, service and emergency. Service are your regular brakes attached to your foot pedal. Emergency brakes are your buttons on the dash, yellow for truck, red for trailer. The red button also charges the trailer air system(it has its own tanks) through the red gladhand. The blue gladhand is the service line to the trailer.
The brakes have two chambers, one with a large spring in it is the emergency side, the other side just has a diaphragm in it for regular applications. In an air loss situation, the air pressure used to release the parking spring on the emergency side lowers and eventually the spring starts overpowering the air, applying the brake. Eventually the protection valves pop (red and yellow buttons on dash) evacuating the emergency side and you have a full application via the spring, no air pressure needed. One potential problem is those springs rust and break. If enough fail you won’t be able to park on a hill.
From what I understand, trains only have one air line dubbed the brake line. It is maintained at 90 psi, and if you lower it 10 psi you get a 10 psi application which is the opposite of a semi. But there’s no protection, every single car will have a leak somewhere, and will lose resevoir pressure. Here’s a good article:
http://www.montrealgazette.com/news/a9gantic+What+causes+runaway+train/8631894/story.html
I’m also wondering if the hand brakes were not applied, the engineer simply relied on the air system to hold everything in place. The train catches fire (sabotage or not) and the responders shut down the train cutting off the air supply. Like I said before, air systems always leak. It was just a matter of time.
No sabotage needed, but certainly a violation of section 112.
Trains equals money and money equals politics. Warren Buffet owns the trains and is a strong contributer to Obama. See how this works ?
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/07/06/canadian-tragedy/?NewsWatchCanada.ca
Wasn’t it PM Harper’s fault…?
Thought i saw an artical in National Newswatch a few days ago with Mulchair blaming the PM for cutbacks and such. Other than the headline i couldn’t rouse my self to read garbage.
What a tragedy. The method the engineer used to hold the train should have been a failsafe system, but it was all fail, no safe. The engine could stop on it’s own through mechanical fault or be stopped by anybody as the train was unguarded. There was nobody monitoring the engine to make sure it kept running and no communication system in place (If the engine stops running, call me immediately at this number, if I don’t answer call Joe at this number, if he doesn’t answer…..) to summon help. The manual parking brake system was unused out of complacency or laziness.
The accident investigation report on this one is going to be long and interesting.
Still many questions. For example, did the engines rolled back with the train? Couldn’t find any info.
Second, if you simply disconnect the air supply, the brakes on each car should hold on the internal air supply on each car. Did all the cars lost the air in such a short time?
And what about the mysterious fire, in the middle of the night, who reported it and why even after the train was left unattended? Or the cars were already not there?
Ah, but it was Saturday …
Cleveland kidnap victims reveal themselves: Girls who were held captive for a decade film heartwarming video to thank supporters
http://commoncts.blogspot.com/2013/07/video-three-cleveland-kidnapping.html
A brief internet search reveals that train brakes operate like every other air brake system. Spring applied and air released. That is, air is used to hold the brakes off. When the air pressure bleeds off the brakes apply, not release.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_air_brake
My understanding of air brakes is that on loss of pressure, the brakes apply. That is fail safe.
But train brakes are not that simple as I discovered but they are fail safe when fully charged.
http://www.railway-technical.com/brake2.shtml#BrakeApplication
Second BDFT, I would have thought the system would have required positive pressure in order to release the brakes, not apply them so that the default setting of the brakes would be “fully applied”. I also understood that much of the braking on a downhill run comes from a “reversal” for lack of a better term of the diesel electric motors such that the armatures of the electric system no longer add energy to the wheels but rather provide resistance to the wheels. Presumably, with the engines off, that system would have been out of action. Either way, relying on any machine to remain running, unsupervised as a way of avoiding utter disaster is itself a formula for disaster. I’ll be curious to see the “Mayday” episode on this one.
UPDATE 2-Quebec firemen cut power to runaway train’s brakes, railway says
Andre Gendron, 38, lives on a wooded property next to the rail yard in Nantes. He said he was burning a campfire outside his trailer on Friday night when he heard the fire trucks.
“About five minutes after the firemen left, I felt the vibration of a train moving down the track. I then saw the train move by without its lights on,” Gendron told Reuters.
http://www.cnbc.com/id/100871020
so, as an old engineer, I ask the question” Where is the fail safe brake lock?”
The operating rule is that when a train is yarded, 10% of the hand brakes, plus 2 must be set. On this train, that would be 12 cars out of 100. Obviously, this was not done. As well, the yard switches were left open. When I worked for the CPR, a train of hazardous material had a crew of five to ensure that nothing went wrong. This train had a crew of one.
Railway Air Brake. The Westinghouse system uses air pressure to charge air reservoirs (tanks) on each car. Full air pressure signals each car to release the brakes. A reduction or loss of air pressure signals each car to apply its brakes, using the compressed air in its reservoirs. So how does shutting down the engine result in loss of braking? You would think that as the air pressure was gradually lost the brakes would gradually be applied and the train would stop. Some important information is missing.
Sheer madness and incompetence, that a lever outside the train could be accessed by anyone passing by. It should never have been left unattended. That it was is ineptitude on an epic scale. How can such carelessness be defended?
I imagine the Montreal, Maine & Atlantic Railway will be fighting massive law suits. If one of my loved ones died in that conflagration, I’d be suing the pants off an organization that would leave unattended such a volatile load — especially as a random passerby could trigger a disaster of this scale by tampering with the lever outside the train.
UN-BEE-LEE-VA-BULL.
My subjective drivel:
Seems like a case of everybody involved took the path of least resistance.
Initial crew left the train to the one crew member under thee assumption they would tend to the train, so they booked off.
Single crew member decided to leave under the assumption the replacement was arriving any moment so they left train unattended.
Replacement took their time arriving under the assumption the previous crew would take care of everything until they arrived, no need to hurry.
The fire crew left after they extinguished the engine fire, no need to have a train crew around, and they don’t work for train co. anyways so not their responsiblity.
Sounds like the root cause is a society that only seems concerned for what they can leverage out for themselves and not how their actions, or lack thereof, effects others.
Similar to how a parasite cares not a bit about it’s hosts welfare, with the exception that the blood keeps flowing.
Which also reflects how transfers to the have not provinces works.
Levant and SNN broke the story that the Quebec disaster has strong evidence of being a anarchist/eco-terrorist attack. Stay tuned to this one, there is a strong possibility the usual suspects have gone one step beyond combative protest. Of course we will hve to hope the RCMP put burglarizing duck hunter’s residences long enough to conduct a legitimate criminal investigation.
“Stay tuned to this one, there is a strong possibility the usual suspects have gone one step beyond combative protest.”
I wouldn’t put anything past eco-terrorist scumbags. They don’t care about the environment, they don’t care about human dignity, they just want to raise Cain, ’cause they’re brainwashed and bored. They fear neither man, beast, nor God. Their world is godless, so anything goes. There won’t be any mourning, weeping, or gnashing of teeth on their part. They’ll be doing a dance macabre on people’s graves.
Oh, but it is.
It probably wasn’t the doing of Muslims (not directly anyway). A terrorist would have claimed responsibility by now. As it is, I doubt your average Montreal jihadi could find Lac-Megantic on a map.
Even if it was a saboteur on the inside, he had help.
The cars the MMA railroad used to transport fuel was of a sort called DOT-111. The DOT-111’s are notorious for being badly made and cracking like eggs when trains are derailed. Naturally, rail companies, including MMA, use DOT-111’s to carry most of their freight and have been in no hurry to replace or retrofit them. Just as naturally, nobody in a position to do much about it has insisted they do so. Bribing politicians on transportation committees to look the other way is much cheaper.
It doesn’t hurt that when something like this happens, it generally happens in a small town inhabited by Englishmen, Scotsmen and Ulstermen who believe in God and His Son Jesus Christ, and built everything there worth preserving. To Barack Hussein Obama, a few “crackers” burnt alive by oil spilt by a train that derailed in the middle of some god-forsaken peasant village in flyover country would be a cost of doing business with Warren Buffett, not a calamity.
Alas for Mr. Burkhardt, he is not Warren Buffett, the train derailed in Canada, and the denizens of Lac-Megantic in range of the explosion were members of one of Canada’s many “protected species.”
Mr. Burkhardt, CEO of MMA, is ultimately responsible for not bothering to insist that his firm adhere to minimum safety standards. The reason he let this happen, of course, was he didn’t expect that he would be actually held responsible. Insurance would pay for the spilled oil, and if this has happened Stateside, as a railway executive and a pillar of the Chicago business community, he figured his Barry in DC would make this go away and keep it out of the papers.
As it is, he could only have been in worse trouble had his train flambeed 40 of Barry and Michelle’s “community,” and he knows it. So he’s flinging mud in every direction praying some of it will stick on the Canadians.
“Seems like a case of everybody involved took the path of least resistance.”
I am coming to the same conclusion, but will again caution against drawing conclusions before all the facts are known. As much as I would like to believe it was eco-nuts behind the accident, what facts we do have increasingly do not support such a conclusion. It looks like incompetence and a lack of redundant safety systems — both human and mechanical — are the likely cause of this disaster.
Bat b – remember that these anarchist freaks also are working indirectly for huge monopolist interests in their focused attacks on rival industries (like the oil sands). Also never forget that since all these protests have stalled the safe transport of cheaper western oil and petro chemicals by pipe line, rail freight monopolists and US/ME oil cartels are making out like bandits.
Was the rail company involved part of the Buffet rail dynasty?
Lac Megantic: Crime Scene:
Personal injury, damage, PTSD Lawyers will be ascending into Lac Megantic by parachute.
Under these circumstances I think it will be a good thing.
Suing Warren Buffett and his hedge funds for say;
20 billion dollars would spin his greedy ass.
I would love to see Obama involvement,
but he has more crap under his door than we can keep up with..
The linked article has an updated one from Monday that quotes the Nantes Fire Department as having turned off the engine, both externally (emergency fuel cut-off) and internally (not sure if they would have been qualified to do so). This is starting to sound more like a combination of errors and ignorance of train’s operating systems more than vandalism.
To be properly secured, the train would have to have air pressure maintained in the brake pipe. If the brake pressure drops quickly, as in with a broken hose, every car on that brake line would go into emergency braking. If the pressure is released slowly, as in a leak or manually, there would be no braking. In normal train movements the pressure is monitored by the engine (and the remote end of train unit) and this is not a problem.
There may also have been hand brakes applied to cars and the engine, which would likely be specified in special instructions to be more than the minimum because of the grade in the area. From Nantes to Lac Megantic there is about a 400 lb drop in elevation over 11 km. It is possible that even if all of the handbrakes on all of the cars were applied that it might not have held it in place without the air brakes.
Railways can protect against runaway cars in areas with severe grades by placing “derails” in sidings that put cars on the ground if they start to move. In this case it initially appears that the standard practice of leaving the engine running to maintain the air brakes was used.
Now shutting down the engine may not have necessarily dropped the air pressure immediately, as it should have been “bottled” in a closed system. After a period of time it would have eventually leaked down to a point where it moved, but from reports it seemed that it moved almost immediately after the fire crews left. That seems to indicate that someone at the fire scene may have released the air while shutting down the engine. If a person is unfamiliar with a locomotive engine and is trying to turn it off, they may be throwing every switch in front of them…
There was also supposed to be a “railroad official” at the fire scene, but given the rural location I would guess that is may have been an unlucky local Foreman or someone with little actual operating experience. I would think that a transportation officer should have been called immediately with any incident involving a locomotive to make sure everything was secure – that should be the protocol and apparently it either wasn’t or the guy didn’t do his job.
As tempting as it is to find bad guys, I would hold off on the environmentalist vandalism angle until more comes out.
Perhaps it’s the case that a little act of vandalims turned into a BIG act of vandalism.
It’s not “scuttlebutt”. The Fire Chief was on Global last night and quite clearly stated that he had shut down the locomotive engine because he wanted to shut off the flow of fuel.
There was a picture taken of the fire on the engine,it looked fairly substantial.
This appears to be a Railway/Fire department F*** up. There should have been a fireman stationed there to make sure the fire didn’t start up again,and a railway crewman to take care of any contingencies concerning the locomotive engines.
When you’ve had one emergency,take special precautions,don’t just go about business as usual.
I was a member of the BC Forest Service for 11 years.We fought fires.When the fire was extinguished,we always had a small crew stay on the fire for a few days to make sure it didn’t erupt again.
The Railway and Fire dept. should have done the same,at least kept watchmen on duty until the next day.
This wasn’t an act of terrorism, just routine incompetence by workers going about their business without thinking,”it’s not my job”.
*
“there’s nothing left to keep the brakes charged up”
as an ex-transport & ttc operator, i can tell you that air pressure has to be built up on semis, buses, streetcars & subway trains to release the brakes and allow the vehicle to move. vehicle shutdown or air leaks (ie: burst hoses) makes brakes clamp shut… a positive fail-safe measure. streetcars & subway trains have a deadman switch… it you fall asleep while driving, or die… it dumps the air and the vehicle stops. buses & semi trucks have a dynamite switch to dump the brakes.
any other system is simply moronic.
what are they not telling us here?
*
Odd… Shouldn’t the brakes be applied when no air pressure is available, i.e. if an air hose ruptures the brakes automatically engage?
So it’s a dead man’s brake.
Well that makes sense… and sabotage being more likely.
Tut-tut. Tanks are 100% privately owned either by the companies that load them or by leasing companies. Railroads themselves own or lease very small fleets, I’m talking a couple of dozen, for internal maintenance use.
As for the train, handbrakes should have been set. Very inconvenient but usually policy on even the slightest grade.
The parking brakes are spring-applied, air-release, so if the air is lost the parking brakes will come on automatically and should hold the train on most grades. Perhaps this was a steeper grade than the parking brakes were designed for?
Someone either disengaged the brakes or failed to engage them
in the first place.
Furthermore, Burkhardt runs shortline railroads. He’s not associated with the BNSF. Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway owns ONE railroad, BNSF, not ALL railroads. He doesn’t even own the biggest or the best. As several commenters have stated, this was a series of inadvertent missteps that resulted in a very large disaster.
Here is my guess: The engine was left running to maintain air pressure to the engine’s (not tank car) brakes and help hold the train in place. The air pressure in the tank car brake system was released to apply their brakes. So the combination of the engines and tank car brakes was supposed to hold the train in place. When the engine was shut down, the engine(s) brakes lost air pressure and released. The brakes on the tank cars alone could not hold the train and it took off.
Each car has its own tank of pressurised air. If the pressure in the brake pipe (which runs down the train) reduces (by action of the driver) or is lost (due to a rupture) a valve in each car will apply the brakes using its local air supply. They would have kept one loco running in order to keep all the tanks charged up, to overcome leaks, and applied the holding brake. Presumably the grade was too steep for just the spring-applied parking brakes (which come on when there is no air pressure) to hold the train.
Train brakes work exactly opposite to transport truck brakes. Trucks have brakes spring-loaded ‘on’ with air pressure releasing them. Trains have the brakes spring-loaded ‘off’ with air pressure activating them. Definitely not a failsafe system.
As to how the brake pressure would bleed off so quickly, I suspect that each brake actuator has a small vent hole (about 1/32nd inch) at it’s lowest point to purge condensation which would accumulate and freeze in the cylinder. When the engine is running the leakage out the bleed holes is a small percentage of compressor output, with the compressor not running it would bleed off all pressure.
Some posters here have it incorrect. The Wiki article explains:
“A reduction or loss of air pressure signals each car to apply its brakes, using the compressed air in its reservoirs.”
The last part of the sentence is key. Remember *all* air systems leak. If the resevoirs leak out only after a few hours, as the train loses pressure there’s no pressure in the rail cars to apply the brakes. On top of that, if there are 5 cars that maintain full charge and the rest don’t, you have a runaway where the 5 cars brakes get red hot in short order.
There is no safety spring on these systems. The safety mechanism is manually applied brakes, which is the question that needs to be answered. The spokesperson is saying they left the engine running to maintain the brakes. This clearly shows they didn’t manually apply brakes which is required:
http://www.tc.gc.ca/eng/railsafety/rules-tco93-167.htm
112. Securing Equipment
(a) When equipment is left at any point a sufficient number of hand brakes must be applied to prevent it from moving. Special instructions will indicate the minimum hand brake requirements for all locations where equipment is left. If equipment is left on a siding, it must be coupled to other equipment if any on such track unless it is necessary to provide separation at a public crossing at grade or elsewhere.
(b) Before relying on the retarding force of the hand brake(s), whether leaving equipment or riding equipment to rest, the effectiveness of the hand brake(s) must be tested by fully applying the hand brake(s) and moving the cut of cars slightly to ensure sufficient retarding force is present to prevent the equipment from moving. When leaving a cut of cars secured, and after completion of this test, the cut should be observed while pulling away to ensure slack action has settled and that the cars remain in place.
In my mind the fire is about the only aspect of this incident where malfeasance is possibly a factor. It does appear that none of the cars had their brakes set and all that was holding the train was the air pressure from the single engine left idling for the night.
I saw this:
“It is still unclear who the last person was at the scene of the stationary train.
”The employee who was on site initially was the employee who brought the train to Nantes,” Ross said. ”That person secured the train.
”Subsequent to that, the fire department personnel were on site and subsequent to that another MMA was called to assist the department.”
Ross said the train was travelling well in excess of its authorized speed when it careened off the tracks, although no exact speed was given.
Ross said the train started to roll after the firefighters and the rail employee had left the premises.”
http://ca.news.yahoo.com/questions-surface-integrity-tanker-cars-lac-megantic-disaster-080456010.html
After a fire had been put out, both the firefighters and an employee left the scene. Did someone forget to put the brakes back on? Surely there are procedures for this or at least paperwork to fill out. Did I miss something?
Train braking is nothing like truck and bus braking.
The brakes on a train car are not held on by springs and released with air pressure like trucks. A parked trailer is going nowhere without a truck, but a train car can get switched multiple times without being part of a train; having to build air pressure to release brakes each time would not be practical.
There are individual reservoirs on each car that in theory can hold that car in place on their own. A single tank car, detached from other cars on a train so that the air line is opened abruptly, will employ a full brake application (aka “emergency braking”) and should come to a stop. Normal “service” braking is done with a small reduction of the full brake line pressure.
Individual “hand brakes” on cars are the ones controlled by the big wheel you see at the end. It is a mechanical device that applies the brake shoes to the wheels and has nothing to do with air brakes. If Rule 112 in the Canadian Rail Operating Rules is followed to the letter, the hand brakes should hold the cars in place in the absence of the air brakes.
Railways typically specify the number of handbrakes required in their Special Instructions. Also, in their Timetables they will note areas that require additional brakes for different reasons; for example: “Double the number of handbrakes required in the siding at xxxx.”
There may be that area of what defines “leaving equipment” that will certainly go under the microscope, because crews doing hand-offs may not always be considered to be subject to that by their railways. It should be if the trains is going to be left unattended. The accident near Edson in the ’90s was caused by cars rolling out of the Edson yard and onto the mainline where they collided with a westbound, killing the crew and a passenger. Because of that accident, derails were brought back into many yards and sidings.
It’s beginning to look like the train engineer had the locomotive running to provide the braking and went off to bed. How long would it have taken him to apply manual brakes on the rail cars?
So, we know the locomotive was shut down to put out the fire, apparently by the fire department. There are no reports from the media subsequently (or anyone else)stating that anyone left at the scene re-started that locomotive to maintain air pressure, before leaving the scene. I’m sure that the fire department didn’t feel it was their responsibility, so what was MM&A’s? I’d be hard pressed to slough this off on eco geeks at this point.