From: jishnu@nospam.verizon.net

On 5/18/2014 1:39 AM, Glen Labah wrote:
> In article ,
>  "conklin"  wrote:
>
>> You are irrational once again.  If Metro-North needs to follow X, Y and Z
>> for safe transport of passengers, then freight RRs which carry oil need to
>> have track as good as Metro-North.  Or, are you saying that Metro-North
>> needs no new program because you say so?
>
>
> The mainline railroads already are doing these types of track
> inspections - or rather the Federal Railroad Administration does the
> inspections with its own cars:
>
> http://www.fra.dot.gov/Page/P0120
>

...snip snip for brevity ....

> The problem here is that a commuter railroad has cars that pass over the
> track a number of times a day, so Metro-North or any other commuter
> railroad that inspects their track by having inspection equipment on
> their cars is inspecting their track far more often than is required.
> It isn't necessarily that they are more safety conscious but simply an
> effect of doing this inspection with the cheapest method available to
> them (that is, using their own passenger equipment).
>
> For freight railroads, the cheapest thing is going to continue to be
> doing the inspections only at the required interval.

The reason that this is an issue at Metro north is because they had some
serious track inspection failures in the last couple of years and their
whole track inspection methodology was called into question by the FRA
as a result.

One of what turned out to be a case of serious omission of adequate
track inspection upon investigation, led to the derailment of one train
and an opposing train crashing into it just outside of Bridgeport CT.

There were other incidents with less spectacular results. When FRA ran
its own inspection they found numerous deficiencies that were apparently
not detected by MNRR's track inspection program. That is why this extra
attention to track inspection at Metro north of late.

It was most likely a cultural and training issue, but throwing in a bit
of technology always seems to go hand in hand with such. Hopefully they
are actually fixing the root causes while they are at it. It is likely
that the root cause was not entirely the lack of equipment.

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