It seems to be true.
In October, DOT published a notice inviting the public to recommend which regulations should be repealed, replaced, suspended, or modified. Accompanying the notice was a list of 20 potential candidates, including 13 of the most significant transportation safety rules of the past decade.
Airlines, automakers, railroads, pipeline operators, trucking companies, chemical manufacturers and others responded to the notice with their wish lists. After the comment period closed, DOT said it would repeal a 2015 rule opposed by freight railroads requiring trains that haul highly flammable crude oil be fitted with advanced braking systems that stop all rail cars simultaneously instead of conventional brakes that stop cars one after the other.
Emphasis added.
The advanced brakes can reduce the distance and time needed for a train to stop and keep more tank cars on the track in the event of a derailment, DOT said two years ago when it issued the rule.
Freight railroads, which say the rule’s safety benefits are marginal and don’t justify the cost, persuaded Congress to require DOT to revisit the rule. The department now says its revised analysis shows costs would outstrip benefits.
Yeah yeah but the real point is that owners and bosses profit from weaker safety regulations while it’s mere workers, and people who live near the tracks, and the environment who benefit from stronger safety regulations. Who ya gonna pick? Owners and bosses, duh.
This is making me rather angry.
Comments
6 responses to “Trash all the safety rules”
Wasn’t the example I was thinking of, but yep, that’s a good one.
What on earth?
Trains have air brakes. There is one air line that is coupled from car to car the whole length of the train. The engine pressurizes the line. If that line is ruptured or loses pressure for any reason (e.g. due to a derailment) the brakes in every car apply at once.
My railroad tech must be outdated or something.
I understand from Post post that the analysis rolling back the new rules didn’t account for the costs of a derailment. Very much a case of ignoring an obvious factor to ensure the analysis says what you want.
Also curious about the new-fangled brakes. I speculate that the pressure drop required for a given car to effectively apply its brake is not instantaneous and the lower pressure, uh, wave(?) travels down the air line so the cars do apply their brakes sequentially (misreported as “stop” rather than “apply brake”), and the sequential brake application is relatively slow – at least as compared to an electronic system. Apply salt to taste.
Whether or not this ends up making a substantial difference in stopping distance… well I just know I don’t have the data even to make an educated guess.
I went to Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_air_brake) to see what I could find out about air brakes.
I had been thinking that it does take some time for air to flow out of a ruptured line, and that perhaps this was an issue. The Wikipedia article puts a finer point on it
The speed of sound is ~1000 feet/second. Freight trains can be many thousands of feet (sometimes miles) long. So depending on the length of the train and the location of the rupture, it could take 2 ~ 5 ~ 10 seconds for the brakes to apply on all the cars. That’s a long time to have unbraked cars rolling towards the derailment point at speed.
Come to think of it I suppose I can offer an observational data point. As I’ve mentioned probably too often, I live very near the very busy Seattle tracks; I also frequently walk right next to them and/or over them, thus I frequently hear a train stop, and it’s sequential.There’s a long series of bangs, which is how I know a train just stopped. It happens at very low speed, when they’re decoupling or whatever – maybe emergency brakes are a different set altogether, in which case my observation is wholly irrelevant.