Lax Oversight of Rail Brake System Tied to 10 Crashes

The failure of a government agency to order the use of available emergency braking systems contributed to the crashes of at least 10 runaway freight trains nationally in the last 27 months--two of them in Southern California’s Cajon Pass--top federal and union officials say.

The crashes, in which at least five crewmen were killed and more than $30 million in damage resulted, occurred in large part because of braking problems, primarily blockages in air-brake lines.

Each wreck could have been prevented if the trains had been equipped with working electronic control systems that permit train crews to apply brakes by remote control, said Jim Hall, chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board.

“It gets to be a situation where people have to die before anybody does anything about it,” said Paul Morrison, an official with the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers union.

Called two-way, end-of-train devices, or EOTs, these control systems have been available for more than a decade. Since 1985, unions have been urging the Federal Railroad Administration to make their installation mandatory in the United States.

The devices have been required on Canadian trains since 1987, and there have been no runaways in that country since. As far back as 1989, the NTSB urged the FRA--charged with regulating the railroad industry as part of the Department of Transportation--to issue an order requiring their use.

“When we identify something that is proven effective, makes common sense and is used in other parts of the world, and the FRA doesn’t see the same sense of urgency we see, it’s frustrating,” said Barry Sweedler, chief of the NTSB’s Office of Safety Recommendations.

On Dec. 13, 1994, after three wrecks, two top NTSB experts on rail safety--Robert Lauby and Dave Watson--were dispatched to an FRA meeting called to discuss brake problems. Once again, the NTSB urged the adoption of rules mandating use of two-way EOTs, but railroad officials expressed concern about the cost--roughly $5,000 per train.

The next day, a Santa Fe freight train broke loose on the steep Cajon Pass grade between Victorville and San Bernardino and slammed into a Union Pacific coal train parked below on the same track, causing damage estimated at more than $4 million.

Sweedler said that wreck led the NTSB to urge in November that a recommendation for mandatory EOTs--which had “bogged down” as part of a massive proposal to revamp all braking regulations--be separated “immediately” from the proposal and adopted by the FRA.

But, as before, the railroad agency failed to adopt the recommendation of the NTSB, an advisory agency with no regulatory power.

However, the Santa Fe promised that it would move with dispatch. Indeed, a train belonging to the newly combined Burlington Northern Santa Fe railroad that started down the Cajon Pass grade on Feb. 1 was equipped with an EOT. But the device was not turned on.

Action Comes Too Late

Investigators say the train broke loose because of a line blockage, hurtling down the serpentine Cajon downgrade last month at speeds of close to 70 mph before derailing on a curve and bursting into flames. Two crew members died, and a cloud of noxious chemical fumes from ruptured tank cars forced the closure of nearby Interstate 15.

It was not until five days later that the Federal Railroad Administration issued an emergency order requiring use of functioning EOTs on Burlington Northern Santa Fe trains heading through the steep, picturesque, boulder-strewn Cajon gorge separating the San Gabriel and San Bernardino mountains.

Two weeks later, the FRA finally requested--and got--a commitment from the nation’s 10 largest railroads to install working EOTs on “all trains operating in mountain grade territory.”

But by then, another runaway Burlington Northern Santa Fe freight train had crashed in St. Paul, Minn.

“Why couldn’t they have done it when we first asked them to?” Sweedler asked.

The union’s Morrison accused the FRA of “doing everything it could to put up roadblocks in the implementation of two-way EOTs.”

“The FRA is too closely aligned with the industry, and the industry didn’t want to spend the money on something it thought was not that necessary,” Morrison said.

A railroad executive, speaking on condition that he would not be identified, agreed with much of what Morrison said.

“The FRA was, in the opinion of many people, taking a long time to go through the process of developing rules and regulations . . . where there were problems, such as end-of-train issues,” the executive said. “The FRA is very slow and studies many cases to death.”

The executive said that if a railroad, a union or a major equipment supplier complained loudly, “the FRA’s tendency was to back off.”

Federal Railroad Administrator Jolene M. Molitoris, a Clinton administration appointee who has headed the agency since Aug. 6, 1993, declined specific comment on the agency’s alleged earlier inaction--other than to say that there was a heavy backlog of unfinished business when she took over.

“The administrations before us were very different than ours,” she said. Rejecting Morrison’s allegations of foot-dragging, she said that since her arrival, “the characteristic has been one of aggressive action.”

“We have responded positively to 85% of the NTSB’s recommendations,” she said. “Safety is the No. 1 issue. . . . An already safe industry is going to be even safer.”

Indeed, a Burlington Northern Santa Fe official contends that the recent rash of accidents involving braking problems “overshadows the thousands of freight trains that safely traverse the country daily, all year long.”

“For a variety of reasons, accidents involving trains happen,” said Dave Dealy, a vice president with the railroad. “But over time, the number and severity of these occurrences have been diminishing.”

Initial Request

Safety officials say that, with luck, no more trains will run away and crash before the deadline set by the FRA to install the devices--next Dec. 15. But Hall says the 10 accidents in the past 27 months could have been avoided if working EOTs had been in place since 1989.

The NTSB’s interest in two-way EOTs was sparked that year by an accident near Helena, Mont., in which a string of freight cars broke loose on a grade and rammed another train. Hazardous materials spewing from ruptured tank cars exploded and burned, forcing evacuation of 3,500 residents.

Although the NTSB made its first request for mandatory EOTs a few months later, there would be at least the 10 more runaway train wrecks before the FRA ordered their use. Those accidents could have been prevented if EOTs were in place, Lauby said.

The 10 include accidents involving a CSX Railroad train in West Virginia on Jan. 18, 1994; a Burlington Northern train in Wyoming on Sept. 7, 1994; a Southern Pacific train in Colorado on Nov. 22, 1994; the Santa Fe train that struck the Union Pacific train in the Cajon Pass on Dec. 14, 1994; a CSX train in Tennessee on Jan. 10, 1995; a Wisconsin Central train in Wisconsin on April 6, 1995; a Conrail train in Pennsylvania on June 30, 1995; the Burlington Northern Santa Fe train that crashed in the Cajon Pass on Feb. 1; the Burlington Northern Santa Fe train that derailed and plowed a destructive swath through a freight yard after breaking loose on a downgrade in St. Paul on Feb. 14, and a Southern Pacific train that crashed in Colorado on Feb. 21, killing two crewmen.

Although these 10 crashes were blamed largely on brake failures, poor braking techniques and overloading also can cause a train to run away.

Freight trains are heavy--a mile-long train can weigh 15,000 tons or more--and their steel wheels roll along steel rails. When a train starts accelerating too fast down a long, steep downgrade, the wheels can’t grip the rails the way a rubber tire grips asphalt.

“Once a freight train gets away from you, there’s nothing you can do to stop it,” said Morrison, who himself has survived a runaway. “Even if you’re a Vietnam vet or a fighter pilot being blown out of the sky, nothing is as scary as a runaway train.”

Dangerous Area

Railroad workers say the Cajon Pass is one of the most difficult grades in the United States, both because of its steepness, which ranges up to 3.2%--a 3.2-foot drop in every 100 feet of track--and its length, about 24 miles.

The pass has been the scene of at least a dozen runaway crashes since the long-extinct California Southern Extension Railroad, backed by the Santa Fe, laid the first rails through the canyon in 1885. A connecting line would reach Los Angeles a few years later.

The Santa Fe gave the Union Pacific permission to start sharing the Cajon Pass track in 1905. A second, roughly parallel track was added in 1913, and the Southern Pacific laid a third rail line through the canyon in 1967.

Cajon Canyon--one of three clefts hacked by the San Andreas Fault through the mountains ringing the Los Angeles Basin--was a remote spot in the early railroading years, and accidents there went largely unchronicled.

But a Santa Fe gravel train crash on Aug. 27, 1924, was remembered in “Cajon, Rail Passage to the Pacific,” a history of the pass by Chad L. Walker.

The train, severely overloaded despite the concerns of several trainmen, overwhelmed its brakes and reached speeds of more than 70 mph before derailing. Most of the crew jumped, with relatively minor injuries. The conductor, back in the caboose, wrapped himself in mattresses and rode out the crash, escaping shaken but unscathed.

The most destructive Cajon Pass crash occurred May 12, 1989, when a runaway Southern Pacific freight train reached speeds of more than 100 mph before it leaped the tracks, plunged down a 30-foot embankment and slammed into seven homes in San Bernardino, killing two trainmen and two boys in one of the homes.

Two weeks later, a gasoline pipeline weakened by earthmoving equipment used to clear away the wreckage exploded in a searing fireball that leveled 10 more homes, killed three residents and injured 31 more.

The NTSB blamed the 1989 runaway on Southern Pacific “management errors,” including gross underestimation of the train’s weight, failure to tell the engineer that part of the braking system was inoperable, and failure to develop adequate procedures for emergency braking.

In 1994, a Union Pacific freight train broke loose on the grade after the engineer mishandled the brakes, according to the railroad. Amtrak officials ordered the San Bernardino depot at the bottom of the grade evacuated, but the train stayed on the rails, eventually rolling to a stop in a freight yard.

Although other factors sometimes come into play, the recurrent problem is the braking systems.

Air brakes--invented by George Westinghouse--have been the primary means of braking freight and passenger trains for almost 125 years.

The electric motors in modern diesel-electric locomotives can be used as a secondary means of slowing a train, much as a truck driver downshifts and uses compression of the engine to help slow a truck. But this “dynamic braking” is far less effective than using the air brakes, and only air brakes can stop a train on a steep downgrade.

The Westinghouse brake system is powered by air pressure, generated by compressors on the locomotives and pumped the length of the train through pipes and hoses. This air line fills reservoirs on each of the cars.

Once the system is pressurized, the air line serves as the control mechanism. When the engineer uses the valve in the cab to release some of the pressure in the line, the drop in line pressure signals the car reservoirs to release some of their air. The air from the car reservoirs pushes pistons in the brake cylinders that press brake shoes against the wheels.

The system has a safety feature: If the air line is severed, the brakes are applied automatically. The system also has a flaw: If the air line is somehow pinched between the cars or is blocked--by dirt, debris, ice or dislodged chunks of rotting hose--the engineer’s brake commands stop at the blockage, and all the cars behind it are left without brakes.

“Almost anything can block a line,” said Lauby, chief of the NTSB’s railroad division. “The hoses sometimes hang down and drag along the ground. Sometimes we find mice living in there.”

Until about 10 years ago, there were crew members in a caboose at the rear of each freight train. Each caboose was equipped with an air brake valve. If a train was failing to slow and a blockage was suspected, the engineer could signal the caboose--in early years with a whistle, in later years with a radio--and the brakes could be applied from both ends of the train.

In the 1980s, train crews were trimmed and cabooses were abandoned. Instead of being manned by someone in a caboose, the brake valve at the back of the train could be activated by the newly developed two-way, end-of-train device, which responds to radio commands from the engineer.

The devices also are effective if the brakes slip on cars that are parked with air pressure in the line, and the cars start rolling down a hill--which was the case in the crash last year in Wisconsin.

A train worker using an EOT could have stopped that runaway by remote control, Lauby said. But because the cars were not so equipped, they collided with another train, killing a conductor.

Railroad officials agree that the devices work--but only if they are in place and turned on.

The Santa Fe freight train involved in the Feb. 1 crash in Cajon Pass was equipped with a two-way EOT, but it was not armed. At that time, neither railroad nor FRA rules had such a requirement.

Under the FRA’s Feb. 22 pact with the 10 largest railroads--the commitment to place working EOTs on all trains operating on mountain grades by Dec. 15--the railroads also agreed to the installation of the devices on “virtually all” freight trains operating anywhere in the nation by June 30, 1997.

After relying on Westinghouse’s invention for more than a century with only piecemeal refinements, the industry is studying the most revolutionary change yet proposed--air brakes activated electronically.

“It’s an extremely promising technology,” the FRA’s Molitoris said.

There are several advantages to these so-called electronic-pneumatic brakes, versions of which operate now on shorter passenger trains.

Because electronic signals travel faster than air pressure, all of the rail cars’ brakes can be set simultaneously, so a train can be slowed much more quickly. The air brakes can be set--and released--incrementally and as often as necessary, because the locomotive will constantly recharge the main air line. And if there are problems with any brakes, electronic monitoring immediately will alert the engineer.

The electronic-pneumatic brakes have been in development since 1991 and are being tested on several trains across the country, winning rave reviews from engineers.

What prompted consideration of the new technology, and why has it taken so long?

“It’s not that we liked the old air brakes so much, but once you have 1 or 2 million cars equipped with them, it’s difficult to change directions,” said Doug Klink, president of TSM Inc., a company developing the new electronic brakes.

The question for railroad companies is whether the advantages of electronic brakes justify the cost of retrofitting the existing inventory, he said.

“But we’ve gone about as far as the laws of physics will allow us to go with the traditional air brakes,” he said. “We can’t make traditional air brakes much better.”

NEXT: A trip down the Cajon Pass.

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Treacherous Rail Pass

Dozens of trains have derailed and crashed on the dangerous downgrades through the Cajon Pass since the first rails were laid there in 1885. In recent years, an average of 100 trains a day labor up and down three tracks that traverse the 24-mile pass.

Brake Safeguards

Under new guidelines, trains operating on mountain grades will require a remote-control braking system:

HOW BRAKES WORK

Train brakes are powered by air generated by a compressor. Air from reservoirs in each car pushes cylinders that press brake shoes against the wheels.

HOW THEY DON’T

If air lines are blocked, all cars behind the blockage are affected, leaving those cars without brakes.

THE BACK-DOOR SOLUTION

In such cases, an electronic transmitter will allow the engineer in the front of the train to activate the brakes at the back of the train and behind the blockage.

Four notable wrecks:

1) An out-of-control Burlington Northern Santa Fe train derailed and exploded in flames on Feb. 1, killing two crewmen and forcing the closure of I-15. 2) A Santa Fe freight broke loose and crashed into a parked Union Pacific coal train on Dec. 14, 1994, causing more than $4-million damage.

3) An overloaded Santa Fe gravel train ran away and derailed on Aug. 27, 1924. Most of the crew jumped, and all survived.

4) A runaway Southern Pacific freight train jumped the tracks and crashed into several homes on May 12, 1989, killing four people. Two weeks later, a gasoline pipeline damaged in the cleanup exploded in flames, killing three more and injuring 31.