Wreckless! Is it possible?

While the rest of us were focused on government shutdowns, states of the union, and how many beds for detained immigrants a democrat would be happy with, railroads were out there doing what they always do: Having wrecks. On February 4, two BNSF coal trains wrecked in Wyoming, also on February 4, a CP grain train ran away and wrecked in a mountainous area of British Columbia, late the week before, a CN freight wrecked in Harvey, Illinois, causing damage to the infrastructure of Chicago's Metra Electric. On February 17, a CN oil train derailed near a village in western Manitoba.

You get the picture. Stuff happens. Minor derailments happen every day.

Coming from the insurance industry, where a total safety posture is the only thing that will prompt underwriters to pick up a risk as big as a railroad train, I want to say that each and every one of these wrecks, and the hundreds of others, reported and unreported, that happen every year, is preventable. Living for seven decades in the real world, however, has clouded my judgment with something called practicality.

No matter how many times you send a detector car over the tracks, rails can and will break for no detectable reason. Build a better highway barrier for grade crossings, and a bigger truck will smash through it and into the path of a train. Even with a new computerized system that will keep trains separated from each other so that there will never, ever, be a collision between two trains, I can imagine a hundred digital disaster scenarios that could result in that never, ever collision becoming one for the record books.

What is probable is that railroads, in the near future, will seek to limit wrecks to those caused by digital glitches and take humans out of the picture. Then you will still have mechanical failure to deal with. How do you detect all mechanical failures before they occur? Tune in next time.