Bob Neal

Dumping petroleum last Saturday into the Moose River near Rockwood probably wasn’t in the script for the first full day of operation for the new railroad, Canadian Pacific Kansas City Ltd.

Let’s hope it isn’t a harbinger for the line that hauls freight across Maine between Montreal and Saint John, New Brunswick. But it sorta looks like just another day workin’ on the railroad.

The derailment was nothing like the chaos of Feb. 3, when a Norfolk Southern train carrying toxic chemicals ignited after derailing in East Palestine, Ohio. Nearly half the town fled.

When the CPKC train derailed at a track washout 15 miles east of Jackman, three locomotives and six freight cars went over onto their sides. A fire broke out, and as yet unknown amount of diesel fuel and lubricants spilled into the Moose River and Little Brassua Lake.

I say sorta just another day workin’ on the railroad because railroads average three derailments a day, NPR says. The Bureau of Transportation Statistics says that’s down from five in 1990.

The Ohio and Maine causes were dissimilar. The Ohio cause seems to have been an overheated journal box (where the axle meets the wheel). The Maine cause was the thaw washing out tracks.

But in both cases, the lack of human infrastructure is at least partly to blame. By human infrastructure, I mean having enough people on the job to put eyes on the job to head off trouble.

In 1947, the U.S. had 1.5 million railroad jobs. By 2020, that had fallen to 145,000. Since the pandemic, it has rebounded to 177,000. Most industries have cut jobs over the years. Some of that is better technology, some is the new management idea that workers are liabilities, not assets. Paychecks get in the way of dividends for shareholders.

Management seems to have decided that a derailment that costs, say, $3 million is just another cost of doing business, even if it could be prevented by hiring a few more people to inspect the tracks, especially during the spring thaw in Maine.

My father, researching the book “High Green and the Bark Peelers” about the Boston & Maine Railroad, back in 1947, rode an inspection car from Dover, New Hampshire, to North Berwick, with two men he called the “eagle eyes.”

They inspected every inch of those 27 miles. Every day. And, they stopped the handcar, a wooden platform and gas engine atop four wheels, at each switch to inspect it end-to-end on foot.

Railroads still inspect tracks, but I’ll bet not daily except on the most heavily traveled routes, such as the BNSF (formerly Santa Fe) line that averages 90 trains a day at Belen, New Mexico.

As part of cutting jobs, railroads are lengthening trains so each crew can haul more tonnage. The Association of American Railroads says the average freight last year was longer than a mile.

A mile-long freight moving 55 mph needs up to 1.5 miles to stop. A passenger train at 79 mph (the legal limit in most of the U.S.) needs a mile. The more time it takes to stop, the higher the risk of grade-crossing crashes, the less time an engineer has to stop if she sees a washout and the more time an overheated journal can smolder, finally to seize up and derail the train.

And the longer the train, the fewer trains. Which is management’s point. Here’s a case in point, though. Maine potatoes last year started moving by rail again. Dozens of carloads headed out west because a poor crop in Oregon, Washington and Idaho left processors short of spuds.

You or I could drive from Mars Hill to Spokane, where the Maine potatoes went, in six days if we didn’t push too hard. The average potato needed three weeks to get to Spokane. It spent more time in rail yards waiting to catch a train than it spent rolling westward.

Cutting the number of trains and crew size has other consequences. The Montreal-Saint John line that became part of CPKC is the line on which an idle train in 2013 rolled into Megantic, Quebec, killing 47 people. That train had a crew of one. He had parked the train and gone to a hotel. I take it as a small positive sign that the CPKC train last Saturday had a crew of three.

The Ohio derailment brought broad support for more, or at least not less, human involvement in rail safety. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said railroads should install new safety measures that combine automated and human inspections.

Jonathon Long, chair of the American Rail System Federation, which represents NS workers, told Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine that NS should add automated track inspection to complement human inspection.

Finally, Jennifer Homendy, chair of the National Transportation Safety Board, said, “We call things accidents. There is no accident. Every single event that we investigate is preventable.”

When a train goes off the tracks between Jackman and Rockwood, it harms the fish and the rest of the environment. In East Palestine, Ohio, it harms all the people, too.

You may have figured that Bob Neal is a train nut. He has ridden the line from Montreal to Saint John, New Brunswick. In fact, that train used to pass his house in Montreal every night. Neal can be reached at bobneal@myfairpoint.net.