Jason Cox, national representative of the Transportation Communications Union, testified on the National Transportation Safety Board’s hearing Friday on the Norfolk Southern train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, that a suspect freight automobile had not been inspected because it traveled through the state on Feb. 3.
A wheel bearing on that freight automobile is believed to have caused the derailment. Cox said it was his understanding that no inspection had been performed on the automobile because it went into Decatur, Illinois, after which traveled through the Ohio cities of Toledo, Cleveland and Bellevue.
“There are qualified mechanical inspectors in any respect these points, and so they weren’t allowed to examine this automobile at any of those locations,” Cox said.
‘The ultimate yes was given by me’
NTSB’s hearing, conducted Thursday and Friday in East Palestine, focused on 4 primary areas: hazard communications and emergency responder preparedness for the initial emergency response; circumstances that led to the choice to vent and burn five vinyl chloride tank cars; freight automobile bearing failure modes and wayside detection systems; and tank automobile derailment damage, crashworthiness and unsafe materials package information.
In line with one in all the reports presented, an eastbound, general merchandise NS train experienced a derailment at about 8:54 p.m. Feb. 3. Thirty-eight rail cars derailed and a hearth ensued, damaging an extra 12 cars. No fatalities or injuries were reported, although there was a 1-mile evacuation zone resulting from the discharge of hazardous materials.
The choice to vent and burn the vinyl chloride tank cars occurred on Feb. 6 due to concerns that one in all the cars could pose an explosion hazard because the within temperature was still rising, based on NTSB’s initial report on the incident.
The primary day of the hearing included discussions about communications that occurred between various emergency responders and NS, in addition to the circumstances and decisions that led as much as NS conducting the controlled burn of the tank cars containing vinyl chloride.
Local responders, NS and the railroad’s contractors eventually reached a consensus to conduct the controlled burn and it was East Palestine Fire Chief Keith Drabick who made the ultimate call. He had 13 minutes to choose when conditions — amongst them, weather aspects and the transition from day to nighttime — proved favorable.
“The ultimate yes was given by me based on there have been no other options,” Drabick testified on the NTSB hearing.
Robert Wood, NS systems manager for hazardous materials, said the railroad backed that call. Other options after conducting a damage assessment, equivalent to rerouting, weren’t possible due to mechanical damage and fire damage to the cars.
“The very last alternative was vent and burn. If you get to that time, there aren’t any other options. And that was the case here,” Wood said.
Rail union warns of ‘public safety hazard’
Union officials are using the hearing as a chance to call for labor-supported provisions related to operations, equivalent to train crew sizes with greater than two people and limiting the length of trains.
The Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen (BLET) said in a Friday news release that while its representatives on the hearing are limited about what they’ll say concerning the East Palestine derailment until NTSB issues its final report, the union can speak broadly about rail safety improvements.
“It’s commonplace for things to go flawed on trains, sometimes many things,” said BLET National President Eddie Hall in the discharge. “It is necessary to have experienced locomotive engineers and train conductors onboard, especially long trains, that routinely carry hazardous materials. But railroad CEOs have pushed for having just one person on the train. We even have some railroads using remotely-operated trains in urban centers with out a locomotive engineer onboard. It is a serious mistake and a public safety hazard.”
Longer trains can put further strain on equipment, BLET said.
Visual inspections of rail cars
A significant issue that arose in the course of the two-day hearing was the frequency of visual inspections of freight cars, in addition to how exhaustive the inspections must be.
Cox said of the 2 sorts of rail automobile inspections which can be purported to occur by law, the inspection that’s meant to serve only as a stopgap to get a freight automobile to an inspection point is getting used more regularly.
The 2 forms of inspections consist one performed by a carman that assesses the entire health of a freight automobile and the opposite, which is less extensive and will be conducted by a train crew member, based on Cox.
“Unfortunately, in today’s rail structure, the railroads have gotten larger, there are less railroads and there are less interchange points. Due to this fact, the [less extensive inspection] has turn into increasingly the first inspection on these cars as an alternative of the detailed inspection … by the qualified mechanical inspector,” he said.
The Railway Safety Act, the bill currently within the Senate, addresses the difficulty of the 2 inspection types and “would fix quite a lot of these oversights,” Cox said, noting that train crews should get more alerts concerning the train in real time and never from a central office.
Other hearing witnesses said that visual inspections of bearings to detect defects could be limited and so technology is required to make sure a bearing’s health.
“The bearings are sealed components. I’m not saying a carman can never detect a difficulty with a bearing. But that’s not typically going to be the case,” said Michael Rush, senior vp of safety and operations for the Association of American Railroads. “That’s why you wish bearing detectors since the visual inspection can’t be relied on or typically is not going to reveal an issue with a bearing.”
Handling data from wayside detectors
One other query was the best way to utilize the information received from wayside detectors to forestall accidents. Wayside detectors can alert a train in the sector and function a reactive device; the information from wayside detectors may also be utilized in trending evaluation, which is more proactive and predictive, based on Jared Hopewell, assistant vp for communications and signals for NS. The trending evaluation involves tracking cars as they travel across a rail network.
A multi-railroad began within the late 2000s to develop a trending evaluation system, and the standards for that system are set by the industry and AAR, with the degree of implementation depending on the railroad, based on Hopewell.
But “I feel that using the measuring stick of how the systems have performed when it comes to only a result-based evaluation on how the bearing-related events have declined over the past couple of many years of their implementation — I believe that speaks most to us at once,” Hopewell said. “Those numbers have come down with the deployment of detectors which have turn into more prevalent. … So at this point, we feel that we’ve got an efficient system. But obviously, we’re going to proceed our efforts to further that, that development and improvement.”
The query about whether the back office has enough resources to handle the varied alerts from the wayside detectors also got here up. In line with one in all the questioners on the hearing, the supervisor for the advanced train controller had been requesting more staffing and that increasing the variety of hotbox detectors could also lead to an increased workload.
In response, Hopewell said, “We’ve got actually taken steps so as to add resources to that desk. First off, to make certain that their capability — their bandwidth — will not be going to be anything that may present a difficulty in the present environment. And in addition resulting from the incontrovertible fact that our deployment of additional detectors and technologies we anticipate goes to present further importance and workload on that desk. So we’re taking steps proactively so as to add those resources and have them trained up and prepared for it.”
Rush added that he was in contact with one other Class I railroad, which said that its back office generally receives two to 3 reports per shift that require analyzing the alerts from wayside detectors.
Challenges in setting thresholds for wayside detectors
But the difficulty with analyzing the alerts from wayside detectors is that it’s an art and not only science, based on Rush. If the alert thresholds are set too low for the wayside detectors, it could also lead to quite a lot of false stops and clog the network because the edge alert authorizes putting a automobile out of service to make repairs. That is where experience comes into play, he said.
“Having said that, as I believe some people within the room are aware, we’ve got been taking a have a look at those thresholds. And we’ll proceed to have a look at those thresholds,” Rush said. “It’s an ongoing exercise when it comes to taking experience under consideration. But really, that’s what it comes all the way down to: [It] is taking your experience when it comes to what thresholds are appropriate for getting those defective bearings off the system, but at the identical time, not consistently stopping trains.”
One other query is the deployment frequency of the different sorts of wayside detectors and union inspectors’ experiences with different detector types.
“In my experience, acoustic bearing detectors are a greater predictor of bearing failures than hotbox detectors,” said Constantine Tarawneh with the University Transportation Center for Railway Safety on the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. If thresholds are set too low, it could possibly lead to many stoppages and delays, he said.
“In our experience, having onboard sensors that measure vibration and constantly monitor a bearing can offer you a significantly better early warning. In a number of the cases I showed, we principally can detect the onset of bearing defects inside lower than half an inch square area with a vibration sensor, tracking it with time until you reach a certain threshold,” Tarawneh said. “The more serious the defect, the louder and the upper the vibration, [the more] you may track. … And in order that a minimum of gives the railroads a little bit bit ahead advance notice that they’ll schedule maintenance.”
One other layer to stack upon the challenges related to bearing inspections is attempting to create more uniform standards for the inspections of wheels and bearings, partially since the stress that a wheel bearing might undergo as a part of unit train could be different than the stress it receives as being a part of a mixed freight train, based on Hans Iwand, principal and vp at ESi Engineering Systems.
The wheels operating on a unit train “may have a special expected life resulting from wear than, as an example, the same-sized bearing and wheel that’s operating under a tank automobile or a hopper automobile that’s used for storage of media or used as a short lived storage device,” Iwand said.
“So consequently, it’s quite difficult to pinpoint precisely when maintenance could or must be performed from a forecasting perspective for this reason broad variation in utilization of the bearing itself,” Iwand continued.” Specifically, if you happen to consider a unit train, 50% of the time that bearing will not be going to be loaded by payload since the automobile is empty half of the time. Nonetheless, in refrigerated cars, those units or those cars are inclined to be loaded in each directions so the appliance of load to the bearing is substantially different since the automobile utilization plays a task. So, unfortunately, there isn’t a easy answer.”
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