[continued from previous message]   
      
   in the green, peaceful valley. Now a flaming geyser towered over the   
   rooftops, and Walls wondered: Was anyone dead? As he ran toward the blaze   
   in his firefighting gear, Walls didn’t know that the tanker car at its   
   center contained propane — enough that if it erupted and set off the six   
   others around it, the explosion could engulf the entire town of some 900   
   people.   
      
   The tanker car still howled about seven hours later as Walls and a number   
   of first responders waited in a cinderblock-walled classroom for word from   
   a train company crew that was monitoring the fire. Then, the door flung   
   open. The room quieted as a CSX worker hustled to the whiteboard and began   
   to write.   
      
   The tanker car is rapidly failing.   
      
   An explosion is imminent.   
      
   We need to evacuate now.   
      
   FOR GENERATIONS, railroad workers considered a 1.4-mile-long train huge.   
      
   Then Hunter Harrison came along.   
      
   Harrison was a railroading innovator with only a high school education,   
   hired as a car oiler in a Memphis yard in 1963. By the 1980s, he had moved   
   into the top management of Illinois Central, a carrier he viewed as   
   bloated and fatally unprofitable. It was an era when most railroads,   
   including his, had an operating ratio in the 90s, meaning that the company   
   had to spend about 90 cents to make a dollar and was netting less than a   
   dime, or 10%, in profit.   
      
   Harrison, a self-described “stern, disciplinarian taskmaster,” was   
   obsessed with efficiency. At a time when other executives feared   
   computers, he used them to track every boxcar and locomotive and learned   
   which ones sat idle. “Railroads,” he once said, according to the biography   
   “Railroader,” “only make money when cars are moving. ... So why would we   
   lay down tracks just to have cars sit idle?”   
      
   When he became CEO in 1993, Harrison looked for even the smallest ways to   
   cut costs, from tearing up unused tracks to eliminating document storage   
   and overnight stays for train crews. By 1998, he had managed to drop the   
   operating ratio to 62.3, a significant jump in profitability. But the   
   savings were never enough. He flew around in a corporate jet with a tail   
   number that read OR59, his aspirational operating ratio.   
      
   In the years that followed, Harrison made his mark as a senior leader at   
   Canadian National after it acquired Illinois Central; he sold off 35% of   
   its locomotive fleet and focused on moving cars in and out of yards at   
   breakneck speeds. To do this, the employees had to work harder, and so did   
   the trains. “I’m impatient,” he once told Progressive Railroading. “I’m   
   also demanding. But I’m asking people to stretch.” By then, he was CEO.   
      
   Longer trains would become integral to the management philosophy he dubbed   
   precision scheduled railroading. The rail industry makes its money by the   
   weight and distance of the freight it hauls. A long train makes in one   
   trip what a short train would make in two or three or four, and with fewer   
   employees. There was no need to design a new breed of super trains; these   
   behemoths could be built from more of the same components: more cars with   
   engines spliced into midsections to help move, and stop, more weight.   
      
   By 2013, Harrison was CEO of Canadian Pacific when he wrote in its annual   
   report: “We’re driving longer and longer trains, which means fewer train   
   starts, faster network velocity and better service at lower cost.”   
      
   America’s largest railroads took note. They began making their trains   
   longer and their staffing margins smaller; in 2015, companies started   
   laying off what would become a fifth of the workforce at the largest   
   railroads. That year, CSX bragged to its investors about its “train length   
   initiative” and how longer trains helped to reduce staff needs. Harrison   
   left Canadian Pacific to run CSX in 2017; that year, the company reported   
   $249 million in “efficiency savings.” CSX told ProPublica that it “impugns   
   the assertion that its management philosophy promotes dangerous   
   practices.”   
      
   Harrison died nine months after taking over CSX, but he’d already secured   
   his legacy. Many of the biggest railroad companies operating in the U.S.   
   had adopted precision scheduled railroading. They were running long   
   trains. The Association of American Railroads told ProPublica the industry   
   has been safely running long trains for more than 80 years. It says they   
   are more fuel efficient and allow companies to run fewer trains, which   
   means fewer chances of collisions at railroad crossings.   
      
   In April 2017, the Federal Railroad Administration got a letter from the   
   nation’s largest railroad union, SMART. Workers had been seeing troubling   
   patterns related to these long trains, wrote John Risch, the union’s   
   national legislative director at the time. “While I am fully aware that   
   there are no federal regulations limiting the size of trains, running   
   these monster trains [is] inherently unsafe and FRA has broad authority to   
   investigate the practice and put an end to it.”   
      
   By the time Risch sent his note, the agency was well aware that the   
   growing length of trains was creating unique issues. ProPublica’s review   
   of more than 600 investigative reports on train accidents over almost two   
   decades found that the FRA had known of problems for years.   
      
   The reports revealed that some long trains were too big to fit into   
   sidings off of main tracks that were often built to accommodate trains no   
   longer than 1.4 miles, and passing trains were crashing into their rear   
   ends. It happened in September 2005 when a 1.5-mile-long BNSF train tried   
   to fit into a siding in Missouri that was 1.4 miles long. The same thing   
   happened the following year in Utah to a 1.5-mile-long Union Pacific   
   train.   
      
   The hulking trains could generate forces powerful enough to break the   
   heavy-duty materials their cars were made of. In March 2008, the rear end   
   of a 1.5-mile-long BNSF train ran forward as the front of the train   
   decelerated, sandwiching the train and cracking an old repair on a tanker   
   car. The train broke in two in Minnesota, dumping 20,000 gallons of   
   ethylene glycol, commonly used in antifreeze, into a tributary of the   
   Mississippi River.   
      
   And long trains that were assembled with too much weight in the rear and   
   too little up front were hurtling out of control and jumping off of   
   tracks. It happened in Virginia in 2006, in Wisconsin in 2015 and in Iowa   
   in May 2017. Short trains can derail in the same way, but experts say   
   longer trains can cause more damage when they fling dozens of cars and   
   their contents through neighborhoods.   
      
   The companies involved in these accidents did not comment on them   
   specifically, but Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern, in separate   
   statements, said they spend more than $1 billion annually maintaining and   
   improving infrastructure for safety and work closely with regulators. See   
   what they said about their broader safety practices here. BNSF did not   
   reply to a request for comment.   
      
   On July 31, 2017, CSX assembled Train Q38831 in a rail yard in Chicago,   
   destined for a city outside of Hyndman. It had five locomotives at the   
   front and 136 cars trailing behind, about half hauling hazardous material:   
   propane, isobutane, ethyl alcohol, phosphoric acid and molten sulfur   
   heated to 235 degrees Fahrenheit. It was a bomb train, as some workers   
   refer to them, given its combustible cargo. When it left the yard and   
   traveled east, the train grew. In Lordstown, Ohio, workers added 28 cars.   
   In New Castle, Pennsylvania, they added 14. Now the train was 2 miles   
   long.   
      
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)