Thirty to forty cars of a CN crude tanker train have derailed and burst into flames near Gogama, ON in Northern Ontario. This is the second derailment in Gogama in a month.
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I read the article your link sent me to Bill...had this on my mind lately as well. Through my area ten years ago the news said on average close to 9500 carloads of crude oil came down the tracks. Last year I believe they said it was around 400,000. For years it's been common to see trans of 30-40 cars at a time, not unusual to see 120 plus long trains now though and most of them are oil tankers, bringing oil down from the Dakota's. Approximately a month ago there was a derailment about 10-15 miles from me to the west, near Dubuque Iowa right along the Mississippi River. Just this past week there was the derailment of 20 plus cars just south of Galena IL, about 6-7 miles from me....also right near the river...5 of these were on fire and you could see it for miles. Car safety should be addressed, but I can't help but wonder if they shouldn't also focus on more track maintenance or whatever is causing the derailments to begin with. I'd be curious to know more about what does cause most derailments?
Here is a photo I took at the end of my driveway last week, about 2 hours after the derailment accurred...to the right of the black smoke is the bluffs along the Mississippi River in Iowa, to the left is the Illinois side of the river, far left is the western side of Galena water tower. Had more cars caught fire would have been a great concern as I think Galena is only a mile or two from the derailment...
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I don't see a remedy to this problem anytime soon.
It seams this is a math issue i.e. the more oil trains the more derailments. And oil shipments have gone up by 400% in the last few years...
I suspect we will see speed restrictions through many populated areas that will further squeeze railroad capacity limitations. I don't know what speed restrictions, if any, are imposed for unit oil or ethanol trains versus general merchandise.
To greatly reduce the number of derailments is something I don't think anyone has an answer for at the moment. Is it correct to think slowing down any mainline freight train (say from 60 mph to 50 mph) reduces the risk and/or damage of derailments?
Paul
Originally Posted by Railrunnin:
I don't see a remedy to this problem anytime soon.
It seams this is a math issue i.e. the more oil trains the more derailments. And oil shipments have gone up by 400% in the last few years...
I suspect we will see speed restrictions through many populated areas that will further squeeze railroad capacity limitations. I don't know what speed restrictions, if any, are imposed for unit oil or ethanol trains versus general merchandise.
To greatly reduce the number of derailments is something I don't think anyone has an answer for at the moment. Is it correct to think slowing down any mainline freight train (say from 60 mph to 50 mph) reduces the risk and/or damage of derailments?
Paul
I don't see any answers on the horizon either and I don't think for a moment that there is a fool proof solution. You can reduce the probability factor at best when it comes to derailments. A chilling scenario would be a grade crossing conflagration after the consist hitting some vehicle. H Harrison is trying to gain the right to refuse certain shipments up in Canada and I suspect he is referring to this oil. I guess the best solution is to beef up the tank cars but I know that one of the recent explosions had the "improved" cars and it had no effect. Sooner or later I suspect municipalities will be the ones to attempt speed restrictions as national rules being imposed seem unlikely as a political hot potato. If another large catastrophe occurs, all bets are off.
I suppose the frequency of derailments per ton/mile, (or however they calculate it) is close to unchanged; however the hazard of a crude tanker derailment with the old DOT11 tank cars instead of containers or boxcars is much higher, of course.
If there is any cure for this, it is the lower crude oil prices, which are making the transport of crude by rail from the Bakken oil fields a lot less economical.
I don't understand why this oil is being shipped period. Apparently we have a 100 car train go though our neighbourhood every day,. Scary. Are we using that much more oil? Did the old supply dry up? I don't get it.
Originally Posted by Gregg:
I don't understand why this oil is being shipped period.
What????
Apparently we have a 100 car train go though our neighbourhood every day,. Scary. Are we using that much more oil?
Ya think????
Did the old supply dry up?
What "old supply" are you referring to?
I don't get it.
Right.
Originally Posted by Gregg:
Originally Posted by Hot Water:
Originally Posted by Gregg:
I don't understand why this oil is being shipped period.
What????
Apparently we have a 100 car train go though our neighbourhood every day,. Scary. Are we using that much more oil?
Ya think????
Did the old supply dry up?
What "old supply" are you referring to?
I don't get it.
Right.
Well we've never had 100 car oil trains running through our communities until recently.
Nice. reply HW
Slow them down to about 30 ....whats the rush ??
How about building more pipelines, oh yea the crazy enviromentel lobby don't like it.
Originally Posted by john f penca jr:
Slow them down to about 30 ....whats the rush ??
John, maybe the railroads in your are have lighter traffic density, but out west here on the BNSF Transcon, they do not need any 30 MPH oil trains running with all the 70 MPH freight trains. That would be like having an old guy in a pickup driving at 30 MPH on an expressway, except that the Train Dispatcher has to get other trains past it in two directions. A 30 MPH train will be delayed and will delay other trains, all unnecessarily. This, in turn, will cause crews to expire on hours of service laws between terminals, and then they will have to be relieved in remote areas. This would be the case on any main UP, BNSF, CN, CP, KCS, or NS route. Crew districts in most places are too long for 30 MPH trains to make it with one crew, and the price of shipping the oil is based on one crew per crew district, among other things.
This problem started years ago when improved technology allowed the oil companies to develop new fields in North Dakota and Canada. The oil companies wanted to build a pipeline from the new fields to existing pipelines in Oklahoma,the proposed pipeline was to be called the Keystone Pipeline.
Environmental impact studies and reports showed minimal damage no permanent damage damage. Some groups did not like this answer so the did all the studies over and came up with the same results. This process wasted about ten years.
I don't understand why this oil is being shipped period. Apparently we have a 100 car train go though our neighborhood every day,. Scary. Are we using that much more oil? Did the old supply dry up? I don't get it.
To get the oil to market the oil companies had to use rail as the cheapest alternative to a pipeline, at least until everybody came to their senses and the pipeline was built.
Pipelines , compared to other methods have good safety records and transport the oil significantly cheaper than rail or road. Think what would happen if instead of a one hundred car train coming through each day you had six hundred more trucks hauling crude oil on the nearest highway.
Another factor is the oil companies have to produce the oil where they find it not where they want it. They would much have preferred the oil to be in Texas like the Eagle Ford trend than in North Dakota.
If people don't like oil trains going through their town contact your congressman and get things changed.
Douglas
@Wyhog: I'd like to add to your suggestion(s). Instead of having a solid oil train, why not intersperse tank cars, say every 5 tank cars you put two (SWAG number) freight cars. That way should a derailment occur not all the tank cars are threatened. It then becomes probability and statistics that you have a less likely chance of affecting all of the tank cars. Granted, to make up this type of train would probably be more costly. But it seems the things they've tried so far have worked very well.
1. Stop running these trains in populated areas when the ambient air temperature is or has been below about +10F. Most of these derailments have occurred in extreme cold weather. It was reportedly 11 degrees below zero several hours before the Galena, IL derailment and only a few degrees above at the time of the derailment. The BNSF has programs in place that deal with the extremes of temperature in summer and winter on the northern routes (such as cutting out and re-inserting short sections of rail on a seasonal basis and patrolling ahead of trains) but I sometimes wonder about the eastern lines where 100+ degrees and subzero temps are rare. I've been out there some nights stuck behind FOURTEEN broken rails! Running coal or lumber over that is one thing, highly flammable oil trains is something else.
2. Reduce the size of the trains so it reduces the in-train forces. No, DPUs do not always reduce these forces. In fact on some track profiles they make them worse. Yes shorter trains would require more two-man crews. So what? Here are some (old) facts...
Way back in the 1980s the freight bill for a unit coal train making a 2200 mile round trip was $280,000. As an engineer I was making about $100 a 100 mile day. Thus engineer costs for the entire roundtrip would have been about $2200 plus bennies. The five 3,000 Hp locos that ran the 700 mile roundtrip portion from Alliance, NE to the Montana coal mines each burned about 2600 gallons of fuel, total of 13,000 gallons for that 700 mile portion of the 2200 mile trip. (I know, I was a hostler at Alliance and we filled them up before departed west and filled them up when they returned, they always needed about 2600 gallons upon returning). East of Alliance only required 3 units so by extrapolation you can ballpark those 3 units might have burned another 15,000 gallons for their 1400 mile portion of the trip. So we have $2200 for engineers and at 80 cents a gallon $23,000 for fuel. The point is that as an engineer I burned 10 times my wages in fuel. If it were a 2-mam crew then fuel costs would have been 5 times the crews' wages. Add to that the costs of running the railroad, officers, signals, clerks, MOW, shops, etc and you can see that the actual train crew costs are a small part of the revenue stream. So doubling or even tripling the number of crews to run shorter _oil_ trains is not an undue burden upon the companies and will not bankrupt them. But I'll bet the 40 car oil trains sure would reduce the number of derailments. At least it would be worth an experiment.
Number 90....i work on the Chicago line...HIGH DENSITY.!! it sounds like you worked on the RR too. My point is that when they pile up at thrity the whole mess ought to be less mangled then at 50...you watch...BNSF boss contributed to Obama and his re-election no keystone till he is out...crj
Some of these tankcars aren,t design to carry oil.I know they carry other things like clorine,cornsurp etc.Why not have instead of a hundred cars oil train.Cut back to 50 cars and have it with mixed freight.Or retrofit some of these tankcars reenforce there steel hulls.One thing is for sure something has to be done.
Originally Posted by seaboard streak:
Some of these tankcars aren,t design to carry oil.I know they carry other things like clorine,cornsurp etc.Why not have instead of a hundred cars oil train.Cut back to 50 cars and have it with mixed freight.
That would require massive switching in order to "switch in & out" the other freight cars prior to the tank cars going into a refinery. Remember that these are "unit trains", not unlike "unit coal trains" or "unit grain trains", where every single car is going to the exact same location, from an exact same location.
Or retrofit some of these tankcars reenforce there steel hulls.
You mean that these tank cars are not steel hulls now?
One thing is for sure something has to be done.
What I am seeing above, is that a larger proportion of voters wanted these accidents
instead of a pipeline. They got it.....I thought that was weird because I know nobody,
but they do exist, who does not hate the gasoline prices, still, now, and yet.
Originally Posted by colorado hirailer:
What I am seeing above, is that a larger proportion of voters wanted these accidents
instead of a pipeline. They got it.....I thought that was weird because I know nobody,
but they do exist, who does not hate the gasoline prices, still, now, and yet.
It's not like pipelines aren't without their problems either.
Rude Crude & Socially Unacceptable.
Hey, that would be a good name for a model railroad!
Originally Posted by Hot Water:
Originally Posted by seaboard streak:
Some of these tankcars aren,t design to carry oil.I know they carry other things like clorine,cornsurp etc.Why not have instead of a hundred cars oil train.Cut back to 50 cars and have it with mixed freight.
That would require massive switching in order to "switch in & out" the other freight cars prior to the tank cars going into a refinery. Remember that these are "unit trains", not unlike "unit coal trains" or "unit grain trains", where every single car is going to the exact same location, from an exact same location.
Or retrofit some of these tankcars reenforce there steel hulls.
You mean that these tank cars are not steel hulls now?
One thing is for sure something has to be done.
I mean have your mixed freight with the 50 tankcars.With the tankcars at the end.Reenforcing the steel hull might help in chase of a derailment.
Spring can be a bad time for track conditions with the frost coming out the ground. I hope we don't see anymore derailments.
Do we have anyone here who has actually handled one of these 100 car unit trains.? Does the stuff slosh around? There were speeds restrictions with cylindrical hoppers that should be avoided. ( Loaded or empty wheat cars). They tended to rock back and forth between 10 and 20 mph (roughly) I forget the exact speeds and could possible turn over or do track damage.
I know no one is allowed to stretch brake any more . whether that would help or not I don't know. Maybe Wyhog has the answer . 40 car trains... I'm guessing a 100 car oil train would be around 10,000 tons or more. Takes forever to get moving and forever to stop. I believe two 50 car trains can get over the road faster than one 100 car train. No I still want cheap gas. 
The one that wrecked across the river from me was going slow, do the cars have any type of baffles inside them?
A pipeline solves the problem.
Originally Posted by Bobby Ogage:
A pipeline solves the problem.
Google pipeline explosions...
Rusty
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What is frequency and impact of pipeline explosions versus tank car explosions?
There is a front page article in the March 9, 2015 Wall Street Journal on the newer oil tankers in rail service.
The oil trains are some of the best to operate. Does not seem that the cars slosh. The cars are relatively new and the brakes work very well. The are equipped with tight lock couplers that also prevent the couplers from jumping up and down , possibly coming apart, like an anticlimber, (can't think of what they are called). The wheels are round, seldom do you hear a flat spot pounding the rail, just a whirl of the wheels rolling across the rail. Listen to them some time, they just sing. (Listen to a coal train, they have flat spots everywhere!) That said, I have seldom used the air bakes to stop a unit oil train almost always use dynamic brakes.
A change I noticed in the last month or so is that the oil trains we get from the BNSF in E. St. Louis are not using distributed power as the once were, just evey once in awhile they will have a unit or two pushing on the rear
I believe most railroads have enacted speed restrictions in unban areas. On the UP the oil trains are restricted to 40MPH within about a 35 mile circle of St. Louis. Most metropolitan areas have these.
I wonder what is causing the derailments too. They will find out soon I hope.
Dan
Pipelines are a safer and a more economical way to ship gas and liquids. They do have accidents some of which are spectacular but their safety rate is better than any other method be it road, rail,or barge. Most pipeline accidents are caused by parties other than the operator breaking the pipeline (think construction crews digging into them and ships dragging anchors).
Once oil is discovered it has to be transported somehow to a refinery then to a consumer, the oil companies have to deal with the fact the oil is where it is not where they want it.
Higher transportation costs obviously result in higher costs to the consumer. Do you want to pay $.50 more / gallon to protect the environment(When the risk of short term damage is minimal and long term damage is non-existent)? Studies showed the Keystone pipeline will have minimum impact on the environment, they also showed it would have less impact on the environment than shipping by rail.
Pipelines are built around populated areas, the railroads were build in the nineteenth century and still go through the center of a lot of cities.
The senate was unable to override President Obama's veto to build the Keystone Pipeline, now the pipeline will be delayed at least another two years. In the interim we will just have to hope no hundred car oil train crashes inside a major metropolitan area.
Douglas
Originally Posted by TP Fan:
Pipelines are a safer and a more economical way to ship gas and liquids. They do have accidents some of which are spectacular but their safety rate is better than any other method be it road, rail,or barge. Most pipeline accidents are caused by parties other than the operator breaking the pipeline (think construction crews digging into them and ships dragging anchors).
Once oil is discovered it has to be transported somehow to a refinery then to a consumer, the oil companies have to deal with the fact the oil is where it is not where they want it.
Higher transportation costs obviously result in higher costs to the consumer. Do you want to pay $.50 more / gallon to protect the environment(When the risk of short term damage is minimal and long term damage is non-existent)? Studies showed the Keystone pipeline will have minimum impact on the environment, they also showed it would have less impact on the environment than shipping by rail.
Pipelines are built around populated areas, the railroads were build in the nineteenth century and still go through the center of a lot of cities.
The senate was unable to override President Obama's veto to build the Keystone Pipeline, now the pipeline will be delayed at least another two years. In the interim we will just have to hope no hundred car oil train crashes inside a major metropolitan area.
Douglas
Don't you know how not to use the BOLD Face type? Bold type doesn't make your arguments any more valid.
Rusty
One fact that some posters seem to miss is that the proposed Keystone pipeline will ship Canadian crude from Canada and connect with existing pipelines in the midwest. The oil will then be shipped by pipeline to Gulf of Mexico refineries where it will be refined. The refined products will then be exported.
The Keystone pipeline will not transport any Dakota crude nor will it provide any oil or oil products to the USA.
It would be interesting to know if other types of trains - coal, refrigerator, inter-modal, lumber, whatever - derail at the same rate as oil trains per ton mile. I have never heard of the Tropicana orange juice train derailing and spilling orange juice all over the place. Maybe we don't hear about the derailments of other types to freight trains because they don't burst into flames, endanger communities and pollute the environment. If railroads have this type of derailment problem on a routine basis then something is really wrong. I would hate to crew a train knowing I was likely to derail if not today, then tomorrow.
The railroads had better quickly find a solution to the derailment problem and the fire problem if they want to stay in the oil transport business much longer. If the railroads don't find a solution, then the government will and the railroads will not like the government's plan.
Joe
Rusty,
Don't you know how not to use the BOLD Face type? Bold type doesn't make your arguments any more valid.
Rusty
I use large and bold type to make it easier for senior and visually impaired readers to read not to strengthen my argument. If you don't have to read with glasses consider yourself lucky, some of us need large easy to read print.
Douglas
Originally Posted by TP Fan:
Rusty
I use large and bold type to make it easier for senior and visually impaired readers to read not to strengthen my argument. If you don't have to read with glasses consider yourself lucky, some of us need large easy to read print.
Douglas
Well the vast majority of the rest of us don't, and you have been the only one doing it. Please stop. Thanks.
Originally Posted by TP Fan:
Rusty,
Don't you know how not to use the BOLD Face type? Bold type doesn't make your arguments any more valid.
Rusty
I use large and bold type to make it easier for senior and visually impaired readers to read not to strengthen my argument. If you don't have to read with glasses consider yourself lucky, some of us need large easy to read print.
Douglas
I can sympathize, Douglas. I've been wearing glasses since I was 10 and have to squint sometimes on my computer or when reading the newspaper or magazines. Plus, there's little I can do at work over the past 8 years without magnification.
CNTRL+ makes the screen image larger so I don't have to enlarge the type within the posts.
Rusty
