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[quote user="CSSHEGEWISCH"]Rio Tinto is not a common carrier and has several advantages as a result.  It does not interchange cars with other roads, handles only one commodity and has a relatively homogeneous fleet of rolling stock.[/quote] I realize that Rio Tinto is different than North American common carrier railroads, but I would not conclude that what they do with testing and research would not have application to our common carriers.  Their handbrake work would have universal application, except that common carrier handbrakes might have to be brought up to a higher standard of performance and maintenance.  This would be costly, but dramatic failures of existing practice are what propel dramatic improvements.  Clearly the Lac-Megantic disaster has set the stage for “reinventing the wheel” of train handbrake securement.  The TSB of Canada is calling for this change and seeking the elimination of the discretional push-pull test, and replacing it with a formula that everybody follows to get the same result.   The oil train runaway highlights a general problem area that needs attention, so the time has come.  Here is an interesting article:  <a href="http://www.vnews.com/news/nation/world/7469774-95/brake-failures-plague-trains">http://www.vnews.com/news/nation/world/7469774-95/brake-failures-plague-trains</a> From the article: In the past 10 years through the end of April, as many as 893 accidents were reported to the U.S. Federal Railroad Administration as being caused by human errors related to train brakes, according to the agency’s safety database. The most common brake-related accident cause was railroad employees failing to secure the hand brakes. The regulator requires accidents that meet a certain dollar amount threshold to be reported. In 2012, 247 train derailments were caused by human actions, including the failure to properly secure the train and use equipment properly, up from 234 in 2011, according to the Transportation Safety Board of Canada. Montreal, Maine & Atlantic has had accident rates that exceeded the national average in all except one of the past 10 years, according to the U.S. Federal Railroad Administration. Over the last nine years, 33 percent of all train accidents in Canada involved a runaway train, according to data from TSB.
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