The Trump Administration is using faulty logic on oil trains

From the Sightline Institute

Stopping Derailments

“To protect communities from the risks of exploding oil trains federal agencies in 2015 assembled a package of changes to railroad operations. One of the key rules they agreed on was so that so-called “high-hazard flammable unit trains” (HHFUTs)—trains hauling 70 or more tanker cars loaded with flammable liquids—should be required to have electronically controlled pneumatic (ECP) braking systems if they intend to travel faster than 30 mph. ECP brakes are more effective than conventional braking systems because they provide an electronic signal simultaneously to every car on the train. Conventional air brakes signal each car individually and sequentially. Because ECP systems apply the brakes to all cars at once, they slow down trains more evenly and can drastically reduce stopping distance. It’s indisputable that brakes help prevent derailments and, when derailments do occur, ECP brakes reduce the number of cars that end up falling off the tracks, thereby reducing the likelihood that an oil-laden tanker will puncture or explode.

Yet in December 2015, about six months after the new rules were adopted, Congress passed a new law compelling the Federal Railroad Administration to re-study the efficacy and costs of ECP brake systems—and to repeal the brand-new rule if it no longer passed a cost-benefit analysis. The law might not have resulted in any changes had FRA still been operating in the Obama Administration. But working under the Trump Administration, FRA officials significantly lowered their appraisal of the public benefits of the new brake rule and rescinded it in September 2018 concluding that increased public safety no longer superseded the costs for the railroad industry to upgrade its cars with better brakes. . .”

“Because the Northwest is a prime destination for crude from both North Dakota and Canada, the Trump-era rollback in protections means greater risk for communities all along the rail lines from Spokane to Portland to Tacoma and beyond. Not even seven years old, the region’s oil-by-rail industry has proven itself to be an extreme threat to communities and wildlands along the rail line—a hazard that could be mitigated with rules requiring explosion-prone trains to use the most effective brakes available.”

Read the entire article at:

The Trump Administration is using faulty logic on oil trains, Aven Frey and Eric de Place, Sightline Institute