Train started to move on its own
EDMONTON • The twists and turns on a rail track through the Kicking Horse Pass were supposed to make the treacherous mountain pass in the Rocky Mountains safer. More than a century ago, engineers burrowed a spiral tunnel, laying track through Cathedral Mountain then again through Ogden Mountain, designed to reduce the steepness of the descent and prevent crashes.
On Monday, however, something went badly wrong on one of the toughest sections of railroading in North America.
A Canadian Pacific Railway train had spent some two hours parked at the Partridge station near Field B.C., with its air brakes applied, in advance of the tunnels, while the crew changed. Staff can only work a certain number of hours, per Transport Canada rules. And so the new crew was aboard the westbound train at about 1 a.m., but not yet ready to depart.
At some point, the train — three locomotives and 112 grain cars — started moving.
It was some three kilometres up-track from the Spiral Tunnels. At a news conference on Tuesday, Transportation Safety Board senior investigator James Carmichael said investigators were calling it a “loss of control,” but don’t yet know why the train began moving.
“It was not anything the crew did. The train started to move on its own,” said Carmichael. “The loss of control is a situation where the crew members can no longer maintain the designated track speed.”
Train no. 301, en route from Red Deer, Alta., to Vancouver, B.C., would have entered the 991-metre long Upper Spiral Tunnel well in excess of the allowable 32 km/h, investigators said, though they don’t have a precise speed yet. Then, on the curve before a bridge that would have taken the train into the 891-metre long lower tunnel, the train derailed.
In between the two tunnels, the train careened off the tracks — all but 13 cars and the rear locomotive derailed — on a curve before a bridge. The lead locomotive was found on its side in the Kicking Horse River. The crew were inside.
Dylan Paradis, the conductor, engineer Andrew Dockrell and trainee Daniel Waldenberger-Bulmer, all of Calgary, were killed. Investigators haven’t yet spoken with the train crew the men replaced.
“Our hearts and our deepest condolences go out to the victims’ loved ones and co-workers,” said a statement from François Laporte, president of Teamsters Canada, which represents rail workers. (The union did not respond to a request for an interview.)
In a Monday statement, Canadian Pacific Railway president and CEO Keith Creel said “this is a tragedy that will have a long-lasting impact on our family of railroaders. The incident is under investigation and we will not speculate at this time on a cause — we owe it to those involved to get it right.”
Garland Chow, a business professor at UBC and an expert on transportation safety, said there are many outstanding questions, such has how three locomotives could fail to slow or stop the train. The incident, he said, is somewhat similar to the Lac Mégantic disaster in which 47 people were killed when an unattended freight train loaded with oil derailed — at least in the sense that both were runaway trains. But that’s where the similarities seemingly end.
“It’s similar in the situation (to Mégantic) but it sounds different with respect to the actual root cause because now it is the equipment, whereas with Mégantic … the process failed,” Chow said, cautioning that he was speculating, given the limited information available.
The Kicking Horse Pass connects British Columbia to the rest of Canada, and is the route for the Canadian Pacific Railway that stitched a young nation together.
When the railway was first built, and for a quartercentury thereafter, trains descended a 4.5 per cent decline into Field, because it was the most cost effective way to build track down the slope, explained Graeme Pole, who wrote The Spiral Tunnels and the Big Hill: A Canadian Railway Adventure. In 1884, the first train to attempt the route derailed, according to Parks Canada, killing three workers.
The allowable grade for CPR at the time, said Pole, was 2.2 per cent — that’s 2.2 feet of descent per 100 feet travelled — and the initial descent was an exception to that.
And so, J.E. Schwitzer, an engineer, suggested the tunnels, modelled after Swiss track design. By 1909, workers had completed boring through the mountains to lengthen the track and reduce the gradient of the descent to the 2.2 per cent. “They did make the railway way more efficient, way safer,” said Pole.
The steeper the descent, the harder it is on both equipment and the rails because of wear and tear.
“In railroading, a one per cent grade is considered extreme,” said Pole. “This has always been a very, very steep section of track, on any commercial operation in North America ... it’s one of the steeper sustained grades anywhere.”