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[quote user="rfpjohn"]With a 20 lb reduction, engine left running, leakage should not cause a release. The brakes would have no greater a tendency to rapidly release with the engine shut down, other than any leakage in the trainline would not be compensated for by the pressure maintaining feature. The brakes would continue to draw down at a slow service rate, from leakage, until the brake pipe pressure reaches zero. The brake cylinder pressure would not diminish up to this point, after the train line reaches zero, natural leakage would eventually release the brakes. On a fully charged brake system, it should take a LONG time for the brakes to leak off on 73 cars. This is why I find the "insufficient hand brakes" explanation for the Quebec disaster hard to swallow. Something more had to happen.   [/quote] I agree that something more had to happen in addition to the “insufficient hand brake” explanation.  If the train had hand brakes set, it would not have rolled with air brakes released.  But also, if it had air brakes set, it would not have rolled with hand brakes released.  Since the train did roll, both brake systems had to have failed.  So there needs to be an explanation for both brakes system failures.  Yet, it seems to me that, now that they believe the engineer failed to adequately set hand brakes, they are not interested in why the air brakes failed. Consider this possibility:  Suppose the engineer did not set any hand brakes, and somebody went into the cab and released the air brakes resulting in a disaster.  Would the disaster be 100% the fault of the engineer for not setting the hand brakes to back up the air brakes?
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