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by Charles A. Turek - September 11, 2023
It's not as if train wrecks are anything new. The phrase "train wreck" has been a part of colloquial English since Victorian times. She or he is "a train wreck" is a popular way to describe someone. "Like watching a train wreck," is a simile for observing something one really shouldn't. Though trains are a less common form of transportation, and less visible, than in Victoria's era, everybody knows what you're talking about when you say, "train wreck."
New or not, the popular media has given a lot of watchable video and readable word count to some pretty high-profile wrecks in the last few months. Some wrecks are just comical, like a recent one where an operator threw a switch under a commuter train that suddenly found itself occupying two adjacent routes. No real harm and no real injuries. Some wrecks are sad, as are those involving trucks and truckers who are just trying to earn a barely living wage when they get stuck on a track. There goes a locomotive, the trucker's truck, his load, and possibly his job. If the impact is hard enough, there may be some real injuries on board the train. If the trucker isn't alert enough, he or she may be another casualty.
Many of the worst wrecks in terms of watchable catastrophe are caused by equipment failures. A wheel or axle breaks, a rail snaps, a gauge spreads or a track simply becomes twisted by heat and weather. Hotboxes used to be common causes, and everybody knew what a hotbox was. The "box" was the part of the wheel assembly that covered the bearings--often a brass casting that held the end of the axle in place. The box would have been filled with grease or oil filled rags to keep the steel from galling against the brass and causing friction, heating the box to sometimes melting temperature. Current practice is to fit axle ends with roller bearings. They can still get hot, but not so easily. Today, defect detectors look for overheated wheel assemblies at intervals along the railroads and notify engineers and dispatchers of any problems. But wheel assemblies still fail.
The recent high-profile wreck in East Palestine, Pennsylvania, garnered a lot of media attention because of the presence of hazardous materials in the train consist and the lamentable response from authorities and the railroad. One could say that the response was, in itself, a train wreck. But the cause appears to have been a wheel assembly failure that managed to overheat and come apart between defect detectors. For such a simple failure, this one caused huge amounts of property damage and endangered the lives and future health of thousands.
The media attention from East Palestine has caused train wrecks to trend. Hardly a day goes by when one doesn't read a report of another train wreck, though most are wrecks that would not have been reported just a year prior. The Lac-Megantic disaster of a decade ago did the same thing for media hype, but the atmosphere was not as charged with blame as it is now. Though it is conservatives who generally dislike passenger rail, it is liberal politicians and liberal media who need to find someone to blame in every crisis. Railroads, currently in the black and flush with cash despite inflationary trends, are perfect scapegoats until the next disaster comes around. Lay off one too many crews and have a bad wreck and you can bet the media will blame "anti labor" policies.
(A note here about conservative thinking: It's really the need for government subsidies that conservatives dislike. As pointed out in prior blogs, passenger rail rarely operates without subsidy, and freight rail has been creeping toward subsidy, as well. Conservatives don't dislike strong safety cultures in railroading, either. It's oppressive government regulation spelling out what a safety culture should be that's anathema for conservative thinkers. Liberals, on the other hand, see limited subsidies as bias against people who can't afford to pay for their transportation, and limited regulation as a desire to see big corporations injure and kill their workers and the general public. As this is not a political blog, that is about all I care to say on the subject.)
In reality, it is surprising there are not more wrecks. But railroad technology is really quite something. Freight train lengths are now pretty standard at 100 to 120 cars. At this length, there are on average 800 wheels and bearing sets, 400 axles, and 200 truck assemblies (known as bogies everywhere else) including springs, and 1600 brake shoes to possibly fail along with about a hundred each of couplers, sets of brake hoses, and supporting pins and plates that attach these things to the cars building out a train at millions of pounds. This is just ONE TRAIN. All of this has to move along the railroad at speeds most people don't drive their cars. I count about 4000 parts that could fail and cause a wreck. And you can't stop millions of pounds on a dime. Momentum is a cruel mistress, and there are places where 50 trains of this size a day move over a single point on the railroad.
The technology that keeps everything together is nothing short of amazing, a perfect example of free-market ingenuity. Miracles roll over the railroads every hour of every day.
So why does it seem like they just can't keep 'em on the rails?
Only a fraction of the general public think they use railroads, or at least make use of them in some way. Most people drive to work even in cities where commuter rail is plentiful. That package you get delivered to your door seems to have been transported by a truck. Those groceries being unloaded at your market are coming off the back of a truck. The big-box stores have big trucks with their names on them.
When a highway bridge fails and has to be closed, the general public thinks it is important that it be reopened ASAP to accommodate cars and trucks. Oh, my, how will we get to school or work or buy groceries? But when a train wrecks, it's ho-hum who uses railroads anyway? When a freight train spills its cargo, that cargo is often reported as chemicals, petroleum products, or coal. When a truck spills cargo, it is often reported as a consumer product that you can use at home without first passing it through something else. So it's easy to see a train wreck as an unnecessary disaster involving an unnecessary business. We want to hear about a train wreck, even a small one, because it may bring about the demise of a business we feel is unnecessary, outdated, or just a plain nuisance.
Soon the mind builds up on this and believes in a disproportionate number of train wrecks as opposed to trucks, when in fact trucks incur a higher incidence of wrecks per unit of time. Here's a small sample of readily available statistics for the most recent year reported.
In 2022 there were about 3 train derailments per day in the United States (source: npr.org) with human error being the leading cause, followed by track defect. Contrast this to about 450 big commercial truck wrecks per day in the same time period (source: truckinfo.net.) And yet you only hear about truck wrecks when an attorney is advertising for clients.
This isn't meant to be an apology for railroads. On the contrary, railroads can do better. Historically the first major corporations--in fact, the legal notion of a corporation was designed for railroads--they were also the first major corporations to develop a safety culture with means to investigate accidents and apply scientific methods to prevent their recurrence. You would think that after almost 200 years, railroads would have gotten it right.
With the possible exception of large container ships, railroad freight transport has the greatest potential for catastrophic injury and property damage from a single incident of any form of commercial transport. So maybe my headline should be changed from Seems Like They Can't Keep 'Em On The Rails to Seems Like They Should Never Leave The Rails. Ever.
I am Mister Trains. mistertrains@gmail.com -- Text content ©2023 Charles A. Turek
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