CP Rail exec touts need for on-board cameras
The recent derailment of a Canadian Pacific Railway Ltd. freight train in central Toronto might have been prevented if the locomotive had an on-board camera tracking the crew’s actions, the railway’s chief operating officer said Tuesday.
The proposal, which has been batted around for more than a decade, is strongly opposed by CP’s union, which says on-board cameras would invade the privacy of employees.
Currently, in-cab recordings are only accessible to government investigators after an accident has occurred, but CP would like to see that changed.
“It’s a very inexpensive technology and if the laws allowed it in Canada I would commit millions of dollars of this company’s money to make quantum leaps in safety,” Keith Creel, CP’s president and chief operating officer, said in a luncheon speech at the Toronto Global Forum.
He referred specifically to an accident in Toronto’s Annex neighbourhood last month that saw two CP trains collide, spilling hundreds of litres of fuel in a heavily populated area.
“After we run a locomotive into the side of a train not very far from here just a few weeks ago, I’m trying to figure out what happened and if I had that camera in that locomotive I would know exactly what happened,” said Creel, who has been tapped to succeed Hunter Harrison as the railway’s CEO in July 2017.
CP has said there was no problem with the tracks or the signals and it appears the accident was the result of human error. However, Creel said it’s impossible to know what exactly happened without video footage of what the crew was doing at the time.
“The laws in Canada need to be changed specifically to allow us to equip locomotives with cameras so that we can see and understand exactly what crews are doing,” he said.
Creel emphasized that the video footage would not be used to punish crews or to invade their privacy, but the company’s union begs to differ.
“If the employers had access to it, it would be used for all kinds of things,” said Don Ashley, national legislative director for the Teamsters Canada Rail Conference, which represents some 5,000 CP employees.
“There’s that added stress of knowing that everything you say and do is being videotaped and recorded. It would create a more dangerous situation, in our view,” he added.
The Transportation Safety Board has been advocating for locomotive voice recorders for more than a decade. The House of Commons’ Standing Committee on Transport recommended in June that on-board recorders be mandated but access should be restricted to government investigators.