by newpylong
I got a kick out of it, after missing the pun. I'm not the sharpest tool in the shed
Railroad Forums
Moderator: MEC407
According to Rep. Niki Tsongas' office, FRA inspectors went to the train derailment on Bridge Street in the Graniteville neighborhood following an incident Feb. 19, where five cars slipped off the track. After walking the site, the administration determined there was a "wide gage" track condition. Pan Am, based in Billerica, will be charged with a violation for that issue which generally carries a $5,000 fine, according to Tsongas' Regional Director Jane Adams. Town Manager Jodi Ross said she was made aware of the development last Wednesday.
Lowell Sun wrote:"Was this something that happened as a result of weather, or was it a failure on the part of one or more employees of Pan Am to follow their own rules?" Banks posed.For someone who is a "rail expert" to accuse employees without knowing the specifics is crude. Especially with that line followed by the state that 30% of derailments are wide guage related...Its obviously something that happens a lot more than because a couple of delinquent employees didn't do their jobs... For a rail expert he did nothing to help the industry out there, what a joke.
According to the Journal of Wheel/Rail Interaction from 2004, the wide-gage code is cited nearly 30 percent of the time in all track-related derailments.
KEN PATRICK wrote:well- didn't pas kick the hornets nest. will the loon who asked the police to arrest the town manager remain employed? unintended consequences. ken patrickWestford is Pan Am Railways, not Pan Am Southern.
KEN PATRICK wrote:well- didn't pas kick the hornets nest. will the loon who asked the police to arrest the town manager remain employed? unintended consequences. ken patrickwould you trust your employer to continue employing you for trying to remove someone trespassing on your property? Ken, this is an EXTREMELY rhetorical question
MEC407 wrote:Rightly or wrongly, everyone is on a hair trigger after Lac-Mégantic. Pan Am could have (and should have) avoided all this drama by simply contacting the town manager and/or the fire chief to give them a quick heads-up about what was going on, and then they wouldn't have had to go walking down the tracks trying to find a PAR manager to tell them what the hell was going on.
It's human nature that if people don't know what's going on and are left to their imagination, they'll fear the worst. That's Public Relations 101. PAR brought this situation on themselves. It's classic "Guilford 1.0" behavior and an example of how some things have not changed.
KEN PATRICK wrote:wow. don't we have some true railroad apologists posting here. can't any of you agree that the town manager had every right to go look at another par incident? the row passes thru her town. it is not immune from local oversight. now she has involved fra . i suspect the far will find something. after all, our govenment folk need to have stuff to justify their existence. so foolish. i believe the railroad needs to instruct all employees to accept that town officials can be on site. not that any high speed train movements exist to pose a danger. after all isn't par content with 10mph? ken patrick
DogBert wrote:There's an article in today's NY Times that starts with this bit of comedy:Once again, the news media reports only 1 side of the story, and puts blame on the railroads..
Jodi Ross, town manager in Westford, Mass., did not expect she would be threatened with arrest after she and her fire chief went onto the railroad tracks to find out why a train carrying liquid petroleum gas derailed on a bridge in February.
But as they reached the accident site northwest of Boston, a manager for Pan Am Railways called the police, claiming she was trespassing on rail property.
'So this genius walks into an accident site presumably where heavy machinery is being used and is surprised she's told to leave?
The full article doesn't talk about PAR much. It's about railroads being 'secretive' about transporting hazmat materials like crude oil - ignoring the terrorism possibilities inherit in telling the public about such matters. I just found the quote above to be pretty comical. Since when is PAR a major hauler oil trains anyway?
Full article
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/16/busin ... ml?hp&_r=0" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
newpylong wrote:If these municipalities really have their panties in a bunch so much they need to lobby their legislators to change the laws.Good luck against the K Street lobbyists.