I saw that in the news, this afternoon : / The train was carrying 73 waggons of fuel, witnesses said that it entered the downtown at 100kmh, its lights were turned off and there was no crew abord. At the moment, the firefighters are trying to control the gigantic fire but they can't approach the downtown and can't evaluate the victim numbers. :-(
From what the BBC article says it seems that it happened while the train was parked during a shift change, so i guess that kind of explains the lack of crew, doesn't say anything more than that though. It all seems a bit strange though
That remind me of the CSX 8888 incident back in 2001 : / Whats bother me is that the train was on the loose and no one was alerted.
I hope that the death toll stays low and the company takes full responsibility. Hard to even imagine how hot it must have been near the blasts, propably way too many people got burns only through the heat radiation : \
From what I gather on the BBC, the train was parked up out of town on a shift change. It seems that some how it's become detached and rolled back into the town. Sad to hear that this has happened, especially on the 25th anniversary of Piper Alpha....
Today our news said it was carrying crude oil... How can that explode in a rail derailment? Wouldn't it need to be heated first?
It was light crude from what I understand. This would be more towards the petrol end of crude that you get, probably with a portion of butane, pentane which is easy to ignite when you derail 70 carriages of a train, this would have cooked up the others until they burst giving the giant fireballs (known as a BLEVE) Sent from my HTC One S using Tapatalk 2
New infos, the petrol waggons were peoperty of Irving Oils. Irving Oils used the services of Montréal Maine & Atlantic Railway, a small second grade company, to save money instead of using the more expensive services of the Canadian National Railway Company. Also, they were supposed to be limited at 25 waggons but were exceeding that number by 48.
Montreal, Maine and Atlantic is a regional railroad that serves Quebec, Maine and New Brunswick. The train was carrying oil from North Dakota to the Irving Oil refinery in St. John, New Brunswick, which is the largest refinery in Canada. The train was brought from Alberta on the Canadian National, and interchanged to the MM&A at Montreal because the MM&A route is several hundred miles shorter than the CN route which goes through Quebec City, La Pocatiere, and Moncton before looping back to St. John. This kind of routing is completely normal in the railroad industry. As for the limit of 25 cars, without seeing a source I would be very skeptical. A 25 car train would generally be considered uneconomical in North American railroading. Trains such as this one carrying all the same commodity from a single origin to a single destination are referred to as unit trains and usually consist of 60-100 cars with a total weight of around 10,000 tons. Current reporting indicates that one of the locomotives caught fire after the crew had left for the night and the local fire department shut down the other locomotives when they extinguished the fire. The locomotives need to keep running in order to provide air to the brake system, and once they were shut down the air slowly bled off until the brakes released. The fire department did not notify the railroad that they had shut down the other units until after the derailment. On the other hand, railroad standard operating procedures would indicate that the crew should have set sufficient handbrakes to keep the train from moving rather than relying on the locomotive brakes to hold the train while it was unoccupied.
My first thought was: So how ill this play out with all the media around pipelines? But here's another interesting take on this: http://www.sunnewsnetwork.ca/sunnews/straighttalk/archives/2013/07/20130709-080807.html Edit:
I've just read a summary on this. Apparently the wagons had been carrying very light material (condensate) which wasn't properly cleaned, combined with the burning diesel from the fire on the loco this got very hot so when the train derailed the light materials exploded and the heat caused the crude to burn. I understand the wagons were over weight too as they were filled by volume but didn't take into account the crude was heavier than water.
