Train moved ‘on its own’ before fatal crash
DERAILED TRAIN THAT KILLED THREE IN B.C. MOVED ON ITS OWN, TSB SAYS
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 uptrack 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, 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’ve 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 the University of British Columbia 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.