Opinion

Commentary
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“UP, UP, where art thou?” asks Texas customer

As all good Texas stories require, this one includes beer. While there is no pickup truck or trailer park involved, a railroad and organized labor are prominent. As often is the case, the railroad appears to wear the black hat; its customer the white. And, of course, there are lawyers, but like the poor and cockroaches among us, lawyers are a species with which we must live in perpetuity.
Commentary

U.S. sway affects Canada CBR safety focus

Transport Canada’s selection March 11, 2015 of new tank car specifications is surely a harbinger of the choice the White House will make later this spring from among the options proposed by U.S. rail and hazmat regulators.

Commentary

Implications aplenty in Supreme Court Amtrak ruling

The Supreme Court March 9 sent back to a federal appellate court for reconsideration a freight railroad challenge to a provision of the 2008 Passenger Rail Investment and Improvement Act (PRIIA) that allowed the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) and Amtrak to collaborate in establishing minimum on-time performance standards for Amtrak passenger trains operating on freight railroad-owned track. The 9-0 unanimous decision was written by Justice Anthony Kennedy.
Commentary
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Bitumen fireballs wreck tank car transition scheme

The second eruption of fireballs near the northern Ontario village of Gogama March 7 adds a third category of crude to the list of culprits in the recent spate of oil train explosions. “Synbit” now joins “dilbit” and untreated Bakken crude oil among the commodities proven to ignite and explode upon derailment and breaching of even the newest tank cars.
Commentary

Fini to saga of Amtrak’s common stock

American Financial Group’s 18-year quest to turn hopelessly unprofitable Amtrak into a gold-coin spewing piñata appears to have met its Waterloo in an emphatic all caps “CASE CLOSED” order of a federal court Feb. 23.

Commentary
  • News

Better rail safety? Buck stops with the Senate

Railroads live at the intersection of necessity and disaster—the disaster substantial when dangerous cargo goes boom, is accompanied by a highly visible fireball, or threatens human life through inhalation or skin absorption.
Commentary

Votes, media time, press clippings—or safety?

I never get tired of explaining the simple mathematics that govern safe train operations. The more thorough our grasp of the simple mathematics of time, distance, velocity, acceleration, coefficient of friction, etc., the more sophisticated, deeper, more inclusive becomes our knowledge of what we must do to achieve safe train operations, and the more robust is our calculation for the intersection of safety and performance.
Commentary
  • News

Can Sen. Thune mediate a rail/shipper cease-fire?

Could it be that Republicans in control of Congress might facilitate an end to three decades of productivity sapping legislative fisticuffs between railroads and self-proclaimed captive shippers over an appropriate level of regulatory oversight?
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