Transport Canada has ordered Canadian Pacific to stop leaving trains unattended without setting handbrakes near the site of 2019’s fatal runaway accident on Kicking Horse Pass after a February incident, the CBC reports, but the railroad is disputing the regulator’s assertion that the event in question constituted “an immediate threat.”
In question is a Feb. 15, 2021, incident in which a loaded grain train — of 8,309 feet and 18,878 tons, according to a Transport Canada letter published by the CBC — was left on a grade with only its air brakes set when the train’s power and crew was sent further down the pass to assist another train. The railroad told the CBC that “securement by handbrakes or other means was not required under Canadian operating rules,” and that the location “was not a mountain grade and there was no reasonable safety concern of unintentional movement.” The railroad said the train was not unattended, because another crew was “on site nearby … in position to act if required,” but Transport Canada’s order says that crew, on a train stopped 1.5 car lengths behind the grain train, could have taken “little or no action” if the grain train began to move.
The broadcaster said Transport Canada declined to say why no penalties resulted from the incident, but that it continues to examine the case and could still impose fines or penalties.
The CBC report references the fatal Feb. 4, 2019, derailment near Field, British Columbia [see “Three dead in CP derailment …,” Trains News Wire, Feb. 4, 2019], which is now the subject of an investigation by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police [see “Digest: RCMP opens investigation …,” News Wire, Dec. 17, 2020], as well as the 2013 disaster that killed 47 in Lac-Mégantic, Quebec. The complicated series of events that led to that event included a train left unattended without a sufficient number of handbrakes being set [see “Burkhardt: Lac-Mégantic jurors made right decision,” News Wire, Jan. 19, 2018].
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