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[CNJRoss]

Railway Age, 6/10:[/i]

Safety-driven railway realignments

As railroaders, regulators, suppliers, and crude oil shippers convene at the Railway Age Crude by Rail Conference on June 12, they may ponder the full range of proffered remedies to exploding oil trains: re-classification of Bakken crude from merely flammable to explosive; de-gasification before loading; better track and car maintenance; tighter operating rules; sharing of consist details with first responders; and, of course, more robust tank cars.

Each of these is a necessary incremental step toward risk mitigation, but even together, they are not enough to make hazmat trains “safe,” except to actuaries comfortable with pricing human lives in terms of insurance payouts. The “cost-benefit” test for safety reforms is unavoidably a callous calculation. It's enough to give regulated capitalism a bad name.

The so-far modest responses to a year’s accumulation of exploding trains (four, plus a near-miss) shows that government and industry have heavy thumbs on the scale. The whines of DOT-111 owners notwithstanding, the solutions currently on the table are cheap in cost, and nearly weightless in benefit.

SNIP

The inescapable equation: Explosive derailment + proximity to human life = fatalities. The formula can be escaped only by eliminating one of the factors. So far, nearly all of the mooted solutions focus only on reducing the frequencies of derailments and explosions. Just one timid suggestion by the Federal Railroad Administration addresses the factor of human proximity.

SNIP

The plain fact is that there is only one way to avoid destruction and death from hazmat mishap: Separate trains from people through a comprehensive realignment of the continent’s 19th century, intercity railroad map into a 21st century, high-speed freight network that bypasses urban populations.

More.