Derailment= East Palestine Ohio

Roscoe, considering the ambient temperature at Salem and EP at that time, (10 degrees F), I believe these readings are significant, for which some actions - such as a speed restriction at the minimum - might be worth considering.

Paul.

The aspect getting only partial attention is not the absolute temperature, but the rapid rate of change. By MP 79.9, the consist had been moving for multiple hours. The delta between MP 79.9's temperature of 38°F {above ambient} & MP 69.01/103°F SHOULD have set off alarm bells.

The FRA has issued a safety advisory regarding Hot Bearing Wayside Detection:

https://railroads.dot.gov/elibrary/safe ... enance-hot

Fair Use:

3. Review current HBD detector thresholds in light of recent derailments, and all other relevant available data (including data from any close calls or near misses), to determine the adequacy of the railroad’s current thresholds. Thresholds should be established for single measurement as well as multiple measurements of individual bearings to enable temperature trend analysis.

This Journal columnist presents both sides regarding concerns held be some arising from the incident.

Fair Use:

Ever since a Norfolk Southern train loaded with chemicals went off the rails in Ohio, residents of East Palestine have wondered if their home will ever be safe to live in again.

On the one hand, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Ohio EPA and a private contractor hired by the railroad say the air and water are safe. On the other, residents are experiencing symptoms such as skin rashes and nausea, and there are thousands of dead fish in local streams. On top of this, some activists claim that authorities who say it is safe are covering up.

QB 52.32 wrote: ↑Wed Mar 01, 2023 11:15 am The FRA has issued a safety advisory regarding Hot Bearing Wayside Detection:

https://railroads.dot.gov/elibrary/safe ... enance-hot

The problem here is, it's guidance. Nothing more, nothing less.

I'm reminded of 2000 AD's Judge Dredd where the titual character would get some information out of a suspect for a "consideration into lightening their sentence." Of course, when asked, Judge Dredd would "consider" it, then deny lightening it (or lighten it by a trivial amount, IE dropping a 10 year sentence by an hour).

NS et all won't do anything until they sniff enforceable regulation coming down the line.

And guess what's coming down the line. Ohio's senators (Democrat and Republican) are introducing the Railway Safety Act of 2023.

https://www.brown.senate.gov/newsroom/p ... b9mS5gGiKs

They link to the preliminary bill text above, but let me see if I can reduce it down:

• Direct the Secretary of Transportation to issue regulations within 1 year of the law getting enacted.
• Regulations cover shipping of hazardous material not subject to high-hazard flammable train regulations (Title 49 Section 174.310) -- shippers/rail carriers will be required to follow it with respect to operations and tank car maintenance
• ...Shipper/rail carrier has to provide advance notice of the transportation of said hazardous material to every emergency response agency along the route, including a gas discharge plan. This includes those from high-hazard flammable trains.
• ...Shipper/rail carrier has to "reduce or eliminate blocked crossing resulting from delays in train movements"
• ...regulations on train length, weight, consist, route analysis and selection, speed restrictions, track standards, maintenance requirements, signaling/train control, response plans, and "any other requirements that the Secretary deems are necessary."
• Enact inspection requirements including minimum time requirements for inspectors to spend per car/locomotive, with separate time requirements for hazardous materials, and tweaking pre-departure inspections.
• Standardize defect detector installation, repair, testing, maintenance, and operation via regulation
• Require the Class I's put a hotbox detector every 10 miles.

In addition...

• Audit all the Federal rail car inspection programs within 60 days of law enactment for compliance with Title 49 part 215.
• Re-audit all class I railroads at least once every five years.
• A sample group of Class II/III railroads get audited every year, determined by the Secretary of Transportation
• If the audit fails, the railroad has to fix the inspection program ASAP.
• Audits will ask everyone, including the unions, for info (documents and testimony)
• Railroads and all railroad employees (including unions) have to cooperate with the audits. Non-compliance gets reported to Congress.
• Every 3 years, Title 49 Part 215 gets reviewed for any needed updates.
• Every year, the Secretary of Transportation has to publish a summary report of audit findings and updates to Title 49 Part 215.

A second section, the "Safe Freight Act of 2023" mandates the following:

• 2 crew member freight trains, minimum. 1 conductor, 1 engineer, during normal operations.
• Exceptions include non-main-line track operations; freight operated by railroads under 400K total employee work hours and less than $40M annual revenue (adjusted for inflation), speeds no more than 25 MPH, track less than 2% grade over any segment of at least 2 continuous miles; rescue locomotives; assistive locomotives (aka pushers for Altoona); locomotives not attach to anything or only to a caboose, but travels no less than 30 miles; operations that were 1 person at the time of enactment but achieve equal levels of safety from above compliance.
• Exceptions to the exceptions include consists that have at least 1 car full of a toxic-by-inhalation material; 20+ tanks of flammable liquid in one continuous block or 35+ tanks in the entire consist; trains with a total length of at least 7500 feet (roughly 88+ cars plus engines)
• Waivers can be applied for.
• Penalties are jacked up ten-fold at the minimum and top at up to 1% of annual operating income.
• DOT-111 spec rail tank cars that don't comply to DOT-117/117P/117R requirements can't be used to transport flammable liquids, starting May 1st 2025 (2025-05-01).
• The Class 1's get taxed $1M yearly to fund emergency response hazardous material training for first responders via grants.
• $22M is dedicated for research grants into better wayside defect detectors through the FRA
• $5M is dedicated for research into stronger/safer tank cars, valves, and other safety features through the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration

Interesting stuff!

R Paul Carey wrote: ↑Wed Mar 01, 2023 10:46 am Roscoe, considering the ambient temperature at Salem and EP at that time, (10 degrees F), I believe these readings are significant, for which some actions - such as a speed restriction at the minimum - might be worth considering.
Paul.

And I'm saying that unless we know what the average working temperature is for a roller bearing under load at track speed, that differential means little to nothing. How do you know the 38 degree reading was abnormally low and came about from the train having been stopped in 10 degree weather behind other traffic waiting out a problem with some train ahead. If the bearings got artificially cold from an elongated stop in freezing temperature, then warming to average operating temperatures is going to be deemed a false positive if you are only examining temperature differential.

I just make them stop and go and its varnish that I handle. I have however taken hits on draggers and hot box detectors and had to walk and templestick trains in my career. Never found a hot one and in the case of this accident it looks like all the holes in the swiss cheese lined up.

I do have a question on the handling of the cars in question though and perhaps they have been answered.

https://wwwn.cdc.gov/TSP/MMG/MMGDetails ... stabilizer.

At room temperature, vinyl chloride is a colorless, highly flammable, potentially explosive gas. It has a faint sweet odor. The odor threshold for vinyl chloride is about 3,000 ppm in air, depending on the individual. When confined under high pressure in special containers, vinyl chloride exists in a liquefied state. It is shipped and handled this way. When burned or heated to a high enough temperature, vinyl chloride decomposes to hydrogen chloride, carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, and traces of phosgene. Vinyl chloride should be stored in a cool, dry, well ventilated location, separate from oxidizing materials and accelerants. Phenol is often added as a stabilizer.

So once reading the above and in the world of better living through chemistry. I question the decision to control demo a bunch of cars carrying this stuff, I get it. It may well have touched off by itself. But deep down inside I have a feeling somebody wanted that messed cleaned up yesterday so that Toppers Gravy Train could get back to running.

It does not matter how much money NS throws to EP that town will never be the same. Sure it will still be in the news cycle for a bit but when it comes time to sell sell sell all those people are going to hear are crickets.

The EPA is a joke and has been for years like most other Gov't agencies they go were da money is. It often tailors its science to what it wants and keeps peer review out of the equation.

Roscoe P. Coaltrain wrote: ↑Wed Mar 01, 2023 7:14 pm

And I'm saying that unless we know what the average working temperature is for a roller bearing under load at track speed, that differential means little to nothing. How do you know the 38 degree reading was abnormally low and came about from the train having been stopped in 10 degree weather behind other traffic waiting out a problem with some train ahead.

By comparing them to the other bearings on the same truck, I'd think, as well as adjacent ones. Are they all trending in roughly the same way? Or is there one outlier?

STrRedWolf wrote: ↑Wed Mar 01, 2023 6:06 pm

• Require the Class I's put a hotbox detector every 10 miles.

That seems like overkill. There's been one HBD issue of any concern I don't know how many years, but now we need to install thousands of wayside devices nationwide?

It would be cheaper to bring back cabooses.

eolesen wrote: ↑Thu Mar 02, 2023 6:30 pm
It would be cheaper to bring back cabooses.

Cabooses are cheap, but FTA might well require someone in them....

railjunkie wrote:
"It does not matter how much money NS throws to EP that town will never be the same. Sure it will still be in the news cycle for a bit but when it comes time to sell sell sell all those people are going to hear are crickets."

I read of one family that has already been barred from returning to their home due to contamination.

Wondering if East Palestine could become something of an "environmental Chernobyl", with an "excluded area" due to the toxins involved.

Or perhaps like Centralia, PA? Where the town was abandoned and dismantled.

Could the residents of the town be "bought out" and have to move out?
Who will pay?
Could the lion's share of the costs be forced upon NS?

A Fishrrman off-the-wall prediction™:
When all is said and done, this is going to cost NS so dearly that they'll be weakened to the point where they could become subject to a take-over by another railroad, or be forced into a merger.

And it's gonna put some major chinks into "precision scheduled railroading" on ALL the big RR's that currently embrace that "concept"...

On one hand we have various government agencies testing the air, water, adjacent land, and insisting there is little if any contamination. On the other hand you have residents and on-site workers reporting various symptoms which would indicate there IS a big problem. Are the tests inaccurate, and/or the reports of no problem being fabricated? Are a whole lot of people all imagining or faking their symptoms?

It's going to be interesting to see how all this gets resolved.

Exposure to Hydrogen Chloride a by product of the controlled demo
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK219917/
Accidental exposure to gaseous products or mixtures containing high concentrations of hydrogen chloride can result in a spectrum of chronic effects, including recurrent acute respiratory illnesses and asthma. Prolonged hypoxemia is noted in case reports, but details of exposure duration are unknown. The maximum tolerable concentration in prolonged exposure of humans has been reported as 10 ppm, with a maximum tolerable concentration for a few hours of 10-50 ppm (Henderson and Hagard 1943). Respiratory tract effects in laboratory animals range from mild to moderate irritation at low concentrations (less than 100 ppm) to nasal lesions at moderate concentrations (100-500 ppm) and pulmonary damage at high concentrations (greater than 500 ppm).

Exposure to Phosgene
https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/compound/Phosgene
Phosgene is a lung toxicant that causes damage to the capillaries, bronchioles and alveoli of the lungs, by decomposition to hydrochloric acid. There is little immediate irritant effect upon the respiratory tract, and the warning properties of the gas are therefore very slight. Pulmonary edema, bronchopneumonia and occasionally lung abscesses develop. Degenerative changes in the nerves have been reported as later developments. A concentration of 25 ppm is dangerous for exposures lasting 30-60 minutes and 50 ppm is rapidly fatal after even short exposure. (EPA, 1998)

HHMMMM I wonder why people are complaining about breathing issues. They touched off four?? cars of that stuff on account of what???

Caught some news this morning as the Rail Safety Act is gaining national attention (and Pres Biden commented positively on it). NTSB is also adding checks into the valves and piping on the tank cars, contending that stronger valves/pipes would have prevented the leaks during a derailment.