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The news indicates the Lac-Megantic runaway has rocked the consciousness of railroad safety in Canada, and the response might spread to all of North America.  As many here have said, my question about the number of handbrakes is unanswerable.  The number can only be found empirically, by a practical test to see if enough brakes have been applied tight enough to prevent the train from rolling.  In Canada, the Transportation Safety Board of Canada has said in 2009 that the empirical test is unreliable on mountain grades.     In Canada, questions are swirling around this very issue of how to secure trains by handbrakes and know that it is safe.  There has been a lot of news focusing on the recommended minimum number of handbrakes to set, and how that number varies widely from one railroad to another, and the fact that there are conflicting numbers on a single railroad.  There is news about the rule calling for the empirical test to make sure enough handbrakes are set.  There is news that asks how the empirical test can be safe without a safety factor, as Paul North had mentioned along with other excellent points in the last post on page 5 of this thread.  There is also some attention on the fact that railroads individually interpret these rules and recommendations according to their preferences, and are not required to make that information public.  So they choose not to make it public.  Therefore, in light of the MM&A disaster, there are a lot of questions about securing trains and not enough answers.  Whatever conclusion can be drawn from all this probing, it is clear that the empirical test is essential to the safe handbrake securement of a train on a grade.  And yet, the preeminent railroad safety authority in Canada says that the empirical test is unreliable.  They said this in 2009:  “Because it is impossible to verify hand-brake effectiveness by pulling or pushing cars on high grades, locomotive engineers cannot accurately know that management's expectations have been met every time cars are secured in accordance with CROR Rule 112.”   This is amazing.  If the empirical test is unreliable, you don’t have a safe and reliable means to secure trains with handbrakes.  That seems like an astounding revelation in the wake of the worst train runaway in Canadian history.  The public asks how they can know that unattended trains are safe, and the answer is that they cannot know.  The public can’t know that trains parked on grades are secure until the Transportation Safety Board of Canada comes up with an effective alternative to the empirical test.  I have not seen much beyond just a hint of what that alternative might be.  It would be interesting to learn what their plan is, but right now, they won’t speak to the public about these train brake issues.  I can’t imagine that they are too comfortable about having announced that the empirical test was unreliable in 2009, and had four years to do something about it before the Lac-Megantic disaster.  It appears as though the very core of the cause of that disaster goes right to the unreliable empirical test which was apparently omitted for some unknown reason.
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