Why are so many trains derailing?
NOTE: this text was not written by me and is from user u/EnglishMobster. The only changes were minor formatting for readability. I would merely link to reddit if they had a way to highlight comments, but they do not.
The original post.
Yep, this is all due to “precision” scheduled railroading at the end of the day.
Run fewer trains, make ‘em longer, put them on a schedule. You save on staffing costs, but it causes a lot more stress on the cars and rails. Trains can be 3 miles (5 kilometers) long, which is much longer than the tracks were designed for. They don’t even fit on the sidings because of how long they are, which means fewer trains can run on the same tracks since they have no way of passing each other.
All this delays shipping considerably - it used to be that if you needed something shipped by rail, you’d let them know and they’d come pick it up. Back then they’d only need to send out as little as one locomotive, which would grab your car and take it to their “yard” where it’ll go on the next train out.
Now there’s a push for centralizing everything and making each individual train as long as possible. They don’t want to have tiny short trains grabbing one-off cars; they want a big long train that drops off giant strings of cars all at once without relying on the traditional rail yards. This means you need to wait for them to decide to grab your stuff - maybe your area gets served once a week by a longer train with 2-3 locomotives instead of running that small 1-locomotive train out daily.
This causes delays on your end, since now you’re at the mercy of whenever some corporate entity decides that there’s a big enough backlog of stuff to warrant making a big train. If you’re too small or out of the way, they’ll ignore you entirely because it’s not profitable enough for them. Lots of small branch lines are out of service and dying because PSR doesn’t service them - and because the freight train companies own the tracks, no rail-based competitors can step in to offer better service.
Because these railroads have monopolies due to 50 years of mergers, the only other option for unserved/underserved businesses is using semi trucks for long-haul cargo. Using trucks for cargo hurts all of us - semis pollute more heavily than train locomotives per-ton. The trucks also use public roads and freeways, which get damaged from frequent use from vehicles that are heavier than expected. Damaged roads and more vehicles also mean more traffic (and more frequent accidents), and the taxpayers get to foot the bill - all because the railroad refused to do its job.
Meanwhile, the few “big fish” get their goods onto a train… eventually. That train is understaffed and overloaded, the track isn’t maintained, and then surprise surprise - there’s a big derailment!
You can read all about PSR here. It benefits shareholders at the expense of businesses, workers, and taxpayers.
And for anyone doubting that PSR is at fault here - this page has a video of the train before it derailed. You’ll see midway through that one of the wheels of the train car is on fire. This is known as a “hotbox” and is a maintenance failure.
Someone didn’t inspect the train cars well enough - because there are hundreds of them and staffing levels have been cut, meaning there are fewer people to do inspections and less time to do the inspections in. I saw a video the other where a rail worker was being interviewed. He said the maintenance guys used to have 3 minutes to inspect a train car; now they get 90 seconds. When something gets missed, it causes a hotbox, which can set the train wheels on fire. There are detectors which automatically detect hotboxes and alert the train crew, but either they weren’t maintained and no longer worked or they were ignored/missed by an overworked crew.
Eventually when a hotbox occurs the wheels will fail, the car will derail, and now whatever is inside the car is exposed to an ignition source. Supposedly the tank cars are supposed to be protected from such things - but evidently they were not, either because of more maintenance failures or because of how the train derailed. Either way, some leaked out, it blew up, and now you have a much much bigger problem.
And it can all be traced back to PSR. They’ll throw the maintenance guy or the train crew under the bus, but it’s not his fault - it’s corporate’s.
The rail workers tried to strike over this in November. A bipartisan bill sailed through Congress to make that strike illegal. Dems backed it because they didn’t want the optics from a rail strike paralyzing shipping, and the GOP backed it because they’re the GOP and do anything for their pocketbooks.
Biden signed it, saying “It was tough for me but it was the right thing to do at the moment - save jobs, to protect millions of working families from harm and disruption and to keep supply chains stable around the holidays,” adding that the deal avoided “an economic catastrophe.”
An economic catastrophe was avoided - but a humanitarian one took its place. If that strike had happened this disaster almost certainly wouldn’t have.