(The following article is from the June 16-30, 2009, issue of People's Voice, Canada's leading communist newspaper. Articles can be reprinted free if the source is credited. Subscription rates in Canada: $25/year, or $12 low income rate; for U.S. readers - $25 US per year; other overseas readers - $25 US or $35 CDN per year. Send to: People's Voice, c/o PV Business Manager, 133 Herkimer St., Unit 502, Hamilton, ON, L8P 2H3.)

PV Vancouver Bureau

Three years after two railway workers were killed in a crash near Lillooet, BC, a Transportation Safety Board report has linked CN Rail's practices for several serious accidents since the company took over BC Rail. That takeover, part of the Campbell Liberal government's sellout of public assets to private interests, remains highly controversial. The stench of corruption lingers over the deal, reaching into the Premier's office, but the judicial inquiry into the sale has taken so long that many voters paid little attention to the scandal during the recent provincial election campaign.

     Released on May 28, the TSB report suggests that imposing CN's operating practices onto BC Rail, and the failure to follow its own safety rules, were factors in several accidents.

     The report blames the June 2006 crash on CN Rail's decision to switch to locomotives with an inadequate braking system following the takeover. Ignoring employee concerns, CN did not carry out a risk assessment before replacing BC Rail locomotives equipped with "dynamic braking". Instead, the company changed to older locomotives equipped with friction brakes.

     "Dynamic braking" is designed to limit the speed of a locomotive going down steep grades, which are extremely common in British Columbia. Friction braking uses only the friction of brake shoes on wheels, a design suitable for the prairies, but not on mountain inclines.

     The Lillooet crash involved a four-axle switching locomotive and one fully loaded lumber car, each weighing about 130 tons, descending a steep grade. When the crew could not slow the train using the locomotive brakes (the car air-brakes were found to be not operating properly), they applied emergency brakes and decoupled the lumber car. The conductor climbed up to make his way to the lumber car's hand brake at the far end, but the car derailed on a sharp curve while travelling at about 80 kilometres per hour, killing the conductor. Travelling even faster, the locomotive left the rails on another sharp curve, sliding down a mountainside. The trainman was killed, and the engineer was severely injured.

     The TSB says the accident could have been avoided had the locomotive been equipped with dynamic braking. The report also says that when CN Rail made its switch, no consideration was given to the steep grades on the line, and no formal risk assessment was done.

     Four CN main-track derailments occurred on the Squamish subdivision south of Lillooet between August and December 2005. The most serious was in August 2005, when a long, heavy train derailed on a sharp curve, spilling 40,000 litres of caustic soda into the Cheakamus River, causing enormous losses to the fish population.

     "Peeling back the layers of the onion, the fact that this business decision was taken to remove locomotives equipped with a supplementary braking system from this territory becomes particularly important," Dan Holbrook, Western Canada manager of the TSB's rail-pipeline investigations branch, told the Globe and Mail. "We know the decision was a financially motivated decision but what's important to the safety board and from a safety-accident investigation perspective is that they didn't perform the required risk assessment, required by their safety management system before making this significant operational change," Holbrook said.

     The company says that employee concerns were not raised prior to the Lillooet accident, a claim which was accepted at face value by the TSB report but widely ridiculed by railway workers. CN has also claimed a 31-per-cent reduction in main-track accidents between 2007 and 2009, and a 29-per-cent reduction in non-main-track accidents.

     But as one post to the Globe and Mail website noted, "this reduction is based on a highwater mark of a 75% increase in 2005. If the accidents went down 29%, that is still a 46% increase over 2004."

     Meanwhile, the Island Tides newspaper reports that "It is rumoured that on the fifth anniversary of the BC Rail sale (July 14, 2009), CN can purchase BC Rail's waterfront lands for one dollar. No details are available, because the documentation of the deal has never been made publicly available."