Crashed train began moving ‘on its own’
Transportation board says crew did nothing to cause fatal accident
Moments before a Canadian Pacific train derailed early Monday, killing three crew members, it started rolling on its own, barrelling down a precipitously steep hill before plunging off the tracks.
The crash happened a few kilometres east of Field, B.C., a town nestled in the Rockies near the Alberta-British Columbia boundary. The freight train, which tumbled off a bridge and into the icy Kicking Horse River, had been parked for about two hours with its air brakes and emergency brakes on when it started moving, the Transportation Safety Board said Tuesday.
“It was not anything the crew did,” said James Carmichael, a senior rail investigator with the TSB, speaking in Calgary. “The train started moving on its own.”
All three of the dead — conductor Dylan Paradis, trainee Daniel Waldenberger-Bulmer and engineer Andrew Dockrell — were based out of Calgary.
When the train started to roll, the crew had just boarded to relieve another group that had worked close to their maximum number of hours, Carmichael said.
At the time, the train was parked on a slope at Partridge Station, the last stop before the crash site.
“The occurrence crew had just arrived on board the train but were not ready to depart,” Carmichael said.
No handbrakes had been applied, and the train ended up accelerating well beyond the 32 km/ h speed limit for that stretch of track, Carmichael said. He wasn’t able to say exactly how fast the train was going when it derailed, nor was he able to comment on reports that the crew made a radio broadcast saying they had gone out of control.
Of the 112 grain hopper cars in the train, pulled by three locomotives, only 13 cars and the rearmost locomotive remained on the track. The rest of the train made it three kilometres before derailing on a curve just before a bridge at around 1 a.m. on Monday, between the Upper and Lower Spiral Tunnels, Carmichael said. Several of the cars ended up on an embankment about 60 metres below the track, while the lead locomotive landed in the Kicking Horse River.
The derailment site is roughly three kilometres outside of Partridge.
Carmichael said investigators have only been able to recover the recorder for the rearmost locomotive, although efforts to get the one inside the midsection locomotive are underway.
Investigators haven’t had the chance to speak with the crew who had been relieved shortly before the derailment, Carmi- chael said, although that is on their list. Their work will include looking at the train’s maintenance history, contacting parts manufacturers about the train’s various components, including the brake systems, and working with CP to determine exactly what happened.
“As with all of our investigations, we will examine all of the information before drawing any conclusion,” Carmichael said. “As such, it is too early to say what the causes or contributing factors are.”
Monday’s derailment raises many questions, said Bruce Campbell, a senior fellow at the Centre for Free Expression and author of three major reports on the Lac-Mégantic train disaster.
“My thoughts are first and foremost with the victims,” Campbell said in an interview, adding it was incredibly early to speculate on the cause of the derailment.
But systemic issues do exist in major railway operations, he said, and it will be important for the public to keep an eye on what the Transportation Safety Board finds in its investigations.
“There is more traffic on the rails, there are longer, heavier trains — especially the oil trains — and … fewer locomotives and fewer operators,” he said.
Meanwhile, in Field, the small mountain town just down the highway from the crash, questions around Monday’s fatal accident between those two spiral tunnels are still reverberating.
Resident Rejean Lareau says it’s concerning, especially so soon after a derailment a few minutes east of town in January.
“It’s the second time it’s happened (in the past month),” he said. “We all worry about that kind of thing happening.”
Nowadays, Field is a outdoorsy town. It’s inside the boundaries of Yoho National Park, just past Lake Louise, but on the British Columbia side of the continental divide.
However, the tiny mountain enclave started out as a work camp for the Canadian Pacific Railway. One train was parked Tuesday morning on the tracks that still run right beside the town, passing by the bunkhouse where railway workers often stay for a night on their way through.
It’s a small area just off the Trans-Canada Highway, dotted with quaint homes. A small, white church sits almost squarely in its centre, and a water tower stands beside the train yard near the town’s entrance.
Field’s identity is embedded in its railway history, but the hill just a few kilometres up the highway — the scene of Monday’s accident — casts a shadow.
The tricky passage through the Kicking Horse Pass is the steepest mainline rail corridor in the Canadian Rockies, according to Graeme Pole, a B.C.based writer who has written numerous books about the area and its history.