Three years ago, in the early hours of July 13, a runaway oil train exploded in the then-idyllic lakeside town of Lac-Mégantic, Quebec, killing 47 people.
At a time when polemics is delivering knockout blows to civil discourse and collaboration, a 78-year-old former amateur boxer—still punching above his weight—has advice on peaceful dispute resolution that lawmakers, regulators, rail executives and labor leaders would do well to read, mark and inwardly digest.
David Schanoes’ personal analysis of the Amtrak train No. 188 derailment at Frankford Junction curve on the Northeast Corridor last year elicited a response from National Transportation Safety Board Director Robert J. Hall, P.E. We publish it in full, followed by Schanoes’s response:
I wish I may, I wish I might, I wish to be an interstate passenger railroad tonight.
You know you’re getting old when a locomotive that has hauled passenger trains on which you’ve ridden as an adult winds up in a museum.
Executive Summary: After one year of investigation, the National Transportation Safety Board has determined that the cause of the fatal derailment of Amtrak train 188 at Frankford Junction is exactly the same as the cause determined within eight hours by everyone who knows anything about railroading.
If you’ve been commuting into New York City on New Jersey Transit’s North Jersey Coast Line and your destination has been Penn Station, changing trains at Long Branch, N.J., has been a given since electrification was extended there from South Amboy in the late 1980s.
National Transportation Policy mandates that railroads be managed efficiently. While railroad performance is reflective of improvement, some railroads excel, with the reasons increasingly under digital scrutiny by activist money managers entrusted with investments of foundations, endowments and pension funds seeking superior returns.
Now that I have your attention, I’ll say it again: The last thing the North American railroad industry needs for the foreseeable future is the long-talked-about “final round of mergers,” resulting in two gargantuan transcontinental Class I carriers that will still have to deal with getting through Chicago.
News item: Executive Order No. 13725, issued April 15 by President Obama, and published in the April 20 Federal Register, mandates that Executive Branch federal agencies take specific actions to promote competition.
