Fred Frailey - Trains Magazine - Trains News Wire, Railroad News, Railroad Industry News, Web Cams, and Forms

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Predicting oil train accidents

Posted 10 years ago by Fred Frailey

I’ve been wondering, as you may have: How many serious incidents involving unit oil trains should you expect? The goal may be none, obviously, but we know a lot about railway accidents, and statistics provide answers. Something I read on the RBN Energy web site, in which a subscriber did his own probability analysis, sent me to the Federal Railroad Administration’s accident database. There, I wasn’t able to replicate what this fellow did, but came up with my own answer to the q...

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Rails get real about the dangers of crude

Posted 10 years ago by Fred Frailey

On January 4, I wrote that railroad executives ought to be running scared, for three reasons: They don’t know why trains of oil from North Dakota are exploding in derailments, they risk losing important new business on account of this, and most of all, because these disasters, one of which killed 47 innocent people, undermine trust in railroads, and trust is almost like virginity, once lost, never regained. To that last reason, forget crude oil—once John Q. Public regards you as the ...

5

Awaiting the revolution

Posted 10 years ago by Fred Frailey

Last year, BNSF Railway’s Matt Rose startled the industry by revealing that his company would test locomotives fueled by liquefied natural gas (LNG), with the possibility of full-scale implementation of this new (for railroads) fuel source starting as soon as the end of 2014. At the time, I called this development “bigger than the shift from steam.” Since then, we’ve been waiting. BNSF’s tests have already begun, using locomotives reconfigured by Electro Motive Die...

19

Simple pleasures remembered

Posted 10 years ago by Fred Frailey

I miss and wish I could recreate in my life today the excitement I felt as a sixth grader at the sight or even the sound of a train. Come with me back almost 60 years, to Sulphur Springs, a town of 9,000 or so in northeast Texas that was lucky to be visited by the Dallas branches of both Kansas City Southern and Cotton Belt. I grew up there, and the best day of the week was Saturday. After lunch I’d bike to the KCS station, about half a mile from our house, to wait out the two freigh...

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The great camera caper

Posted 10 years ago by Fred Frailey

Mr. Frailey, you seem quite vexed today. What is the matter? The damn politicians, is what puts me out of sorts. Up theirs! Sir! I don’t know what “up theirs” means but it seems ugly. Get control of yourself. What is going on? What is going on, my friend, is that we had a railway accident that was preventable, and the politicians have intervened to superimpose a solution that does not in any way prevent such an accident from happening again. In other words, business as usual ...

47

The trouble with writing about train travel

Posted 10 years ago by Fred Frailey

The writer Paul Theroux started something with The Great Train Bazaar, the tale of his adventures in 1972, spanning the globe by rail. I found the book only moderately interesting, and his later rail-travel books pretty tedious, the exception being the account of traveling through central Argentina in utter misery on a steam-hauled narrow-gauge train beset by a dust storm, in The Old Patagonian Express. Since then, others have mined this genre. One well-praised book (by others, not by me) had it...

27

Let's beat up on lawyers

Posted 10 years ago by Fred Frailey

Both of my wives (god bless each, in turn) are lawyers, so I realize they are folks society needs, just like journalists, members of Congress, and morticians, who often are also targets of disdain. But sometimes your mouth is open in unbelievable wonder at the audacity of the legal profession. The Desert Dispatch, of Barstow, Calif., provides the text for today’s sermon, and I thank Bill Baird’s Tortoise Tattler (go here to sign up for his weekday feed and here for the original stor...

67

Fear at headquarters

Posted 10 years ago by Fred Frailey

The folks who run the big freight railroads are a frightened lot these days. If they are not, they ought to be. Three times in six months, unit crude oil trains have derailed and cars of oil exploded. Forty-seven people are dead . . . so far. The railroad executives are frightened (or, again, should be) for three reasons. First, you can’t fix what you don’t know is broken. All three trains originated in North Dakota, two from separate terminals served by BNSF Railway and one from a ...

27

CSX cracks open a new line of business

Posted 10 years ago by Fred Frailey

I couldn’t believe my ears. Washington, D.C., radio station WTOP reports that CSX Transportation has shot from 0 to 100 percent market share in a product vital to the enjoyments of foodies like me: oyster shells. It seems that nearby Chesapeake Bay’s oyster population has gone into sharp decline because of overfishing and disease. Meanwhile, the beds of shells that oyster larva attach to in the early weeks of life have been covered over by silt. To the rescue, CSX. In a partnership ...

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