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.
voluntere fire department is quite possibly a large part of the answer as to what “happened”
I can remember quite a few times where a knuckle would break on a train going near where I lived. And those other cars would auto-brake(and when that happened, the vibration was strong enough you could feel it in the house), and the engine would have to back up several klicks, replace the knuckle, re-attach, rebuild the pressure before they could go again. Usually took 2-3hrs for all of that to go.
“Surely there are procedures for this or at least paperwork to fill out. Did I miss something?”
This is Quebec.
And, no one pays attention anymore. No one’s responsible anymore. No one’s accountable anymore.
And, now, a lot of people are dead.
Sadly, we’re going to see a lot more similar kinds of disasters; just look at the plane crash landing in San Fran.
Pardon my ignorance but, I have always been of the opinion that air brakes were set when air prssure is low and gradually released as pressure builds. Will someone who really knows please enlighten me? If I’m wrong, I damned if I know where I got this idea.
The cars do NOT have passive brakes like vehicles with air-brakes. I am told this is so the cars can be shuffled around sidings which happens a great deal all long the trip. As has been previously stated above there are lots of rules and regulations governing the handling of trains and it may very well be that some of those rules were neglected. It is fairly clear that the manual brakes were not properly set for whatever reason, but it still required the engine be disabled — shutting down the brake compressors and allowing the whole series of events to unfold. I am most interested to find out what was the cause of the engine fire.
Zog said: “I have always been of the opinion that air brakes were set when air prssure is low and gradually released as pressure builds.”
That’s how it is on big trucks. The differences of opinion I see above indicate that my assumptions about trains being the same may be incorrect.
In any case, leaving a whole train of oil at the top of a hill unattended seems like a standard union worker kind of thing to do. “Path of least resistance” is what ALWAYS happens unless there’s some grizzled old ex-sergeant type on scene to put his boot into somebody’s @ss regularly.
The current tiny and ever dwindling supply of ex-sergeants is just one more thing we can thank Trudeau for.
Trains do not require air pressure to apply brakes. They require air pressure to RELEASE them. Without air pressure the brakes will automatically apply until they are manually released on EACH CAR.
I spent nearly 40 years operating trains in heavy grade territory. Freight train air brakes are complex systems because each car has a separate brake system of its own. The engineer doesn’t manipulate a single brake, he manipulates the brakes on each car and that takes considerable expertise and skill. I wont get into technical details since I don’t know who may be reading this with sabotage in mind.
As well, without the benefit of a detailed investigation I can only offer supposition and guesswork as to what happened in this situation since I don’t know the territory.
First of all it is quite acceptable to park a train almost any where that doesn’t interfere with main line operations.Topography is always a factor however for the most part almost anything is possible. I never encountered a single occasion where the cars moved.
In the Megantic case, it appears that the train was left either on the main track or in a siding at the top of a fairly good grade with five engines attached and the brake pipe connected. This is common railway procedure. In my experience, it would be good operating practice to apply manual handbrakes to at least the five locomotives if not some of the cars since there were 70 some loaded cars present or about 7500 tons of train. Thats a mile long and a fair bit of weight although trains upward of 15,000 tons are common nowadays.
If the media is to be believed and I have found them to be exceptionally ignorant of how railways work, the train arrived and the engineer left it unattended with NO hand brakes applied and the cab unlocked. Only the engine independent air brakes were applied. Strangely enough,shortly thereafter a fire broke out on the lead engine which is exceedingly rare. The fire department attended and someone entered the cab and inadvertently tampered with the engineers controls in an attempt to shut down the engine. The engine apparently was shutdown, the fire extinguished and the fire crew left. Shortly thereafter the train rolled away and crashed.
It would seem to me that if sufficient hand brakes were applied to the train, there would have been no crash regardless whether any of the locomotives were left running or not. If, in fact, hand brakes were applied by the arriving engineer but released after his departure then this amounts to sabotage since the fire department would have no reason to tamper with them.
Only an exhaustive investigation will reveal what actually happened.
So we are correct in assuming that individual train car brakes default to “on” unless air pressure is kept up in the car tanks? Because if that’s the case, either sabotage or truly epic laziness plus equipment failure must be at work.
My bet is on laziness. If brakes do default to on, the only reason to keep an engine running for air pressure is to avoid having to pump up all the air tanks on every car the next mornng. On a mile-long train that would be an all-day job for one or even two guys, right? Same with setting the car brakes by hand.
There’s a reason why Sloth is one of the seven deadly sins.
Everything you wanted to know about train brakes:
http://www.alkrug.vcn.com/rrfacts/brakes.htm
The General Concept:
Each freight car has an air tank on it called the SERVICE RESERVOIR. This reservoir is charged with compressed air from the locomotive’s air compressor via the train line BRAKE PIPE. (The air hoses you see at the couplings between the cars are part of this brake pipe. Perhaps you have heard them go Kapowssssh when the cars are uncoupled. That sound is the compressed air escaping from the brake pipe). After the initial charging of the reservoirs on the cars the brakes can be set (applied) by REDUCING the pressure in the brake pipe. When the brake pipe pressure is reduced the CONTROL VALVE on each car causes the compressed air from each car’s reservoir to be directed into that car’s BRAKE CYLINDER where it pushes on the brake cylinder PISTON to apply the brakes on the car. Note that the air pressure, which creates the force on the brake piston, comes from the reservoir on that car. If you have no air in the reservoir then you will have no brakes. If you are moving at that time then you have a run away.
Interesting to hear that the engineer reportedly has said he set the park brakes on 10 cars which should have been enough to hold the train stationary regardless of whether the loco was running and supplying air. If they were set, somebody had to “un” set them for the train to roll away.