Saw an interesting article a while back about railroads (and highways) in Canada, where some areas were considering rerouting the railroad around some of the smaller towns in the middle of nowhere. Basic issue was (as is also true in the US) that the towns grew up around the RR station or yard, and now large quantities of stuff are being hauled through that perhaps would best be kept away from all that development that sprang up around the station - just in case something happens, or even just to minimize the noise and other nuisances.

What we have here is not a lack of information. The available information is easy to get and the issues are easy to infer. Basic issue is that the railroad was practically always there first (as, often, was the highway or even freeway). Stuff was built around it (access to property is a large element of its value) and people now live/work very close to transportation arteries, so when (following Murphy) something goes wrong it's very possible that 1) it will hurt somebody; or 2) it's visible in a time where there are cameras & phones everywhere, and therefore where "disaster" pictures and videos are easily available for "news"mongers who get paid by eyeballs on the page not accuracy of reporting.

Statistically, railroads are probably almost as safe (counted in terms of (a) unintended releases of hazardous material; and (b) releases causing damage off the property) at hauling this stuff as pipelines. Highway hauling is far more likely to have releases. However, pipelines and, to a slightly lesser extent, railroads have the potential to release a lot more stuff at a time when something bad happens. So it's more spectacular, and more likely to extend "off the property," even though (as the reported EIR language for the Benecia refinery project noted) the probability of it happening is vanishingly small at any particular location. That assumes, of course, that the trains are operated properly on well-maintained track; things like Lac Megantic happen when for whatever reasons (probably plural in that case) the train isn't operated (or tied down) properly, or somebody intentionally or not disturbs the situation.

The real question has to be: how "safe" is safe enough - it's impossible to completely eliminate the possibility of a problem as long as the potential source is there (so move the railroad?). If you move the houses and maybe some businesses (those that don't depend on the railroad) far enough back, then things can happen that are visually interesting but not particularly damaging to those nearby. Case in point: propane car fire in Lincoln CA several years ago that was specatcular, and could have been very bad, but because the cars were some distance from nearby development (open area around it) there was plenty of room to work on the fire and nothing really bad happened (other than some short-term evacuations "just in case").

As for "OMG where are those exploding oil trains!!??!!" -- they're almost everywhere, live with it. Expect them anyplace there's through train traffic, where there's a refinery, where (as with propane) there's a convenient spot to transload trainloads to trucks or pipelines. It's not any business of the Press to be listing the times and places where the oil trains are or will be - that's legitimately private operating information the railroads should hang on to. I do think that listing all that information in public would add to the disaster potential, since crazies would no longer need to do any work to figure out where and when to make a "BOOM." So tell the Bee and other newspapers to take a hike. On the other hand, it's perfectly legitimate for local emergency responders to be told what kind of materials are being hauled in an area, and approximately how often and how much, so they can be prepared to respond to issues IF they occur.

Wonder if AAR or somebody else has stats on how much Bakken (or other) oil has been hauled vs. the number of uncontrolled or unplanned releases, with cause? I suspect the problem numbers (despite some spectacular pictures) are exceedingly small. Of course, as with large explosions and fires of other kinds, that doesn't help when it happens (and it will) in somebody's neighborhood. Rather than preventing movement of things that need to be moved, we should be concentrating on reducing the chance for a problem in the first place (track & equipment choice and maintenance, crew and dispatcher training and attention, adding buffer zones where development is really close to the tracks (the locals really should pay for this), and in some cases moving the railroad to where a buffer is easier to provide).

Oh yes - that horrible Bakken oil - it has been said (though official analyses are lacking at least in public) that oil from that area has a higher volatile content than average crude oil, so if it is released and a source of ignition is handy (sparks from broken metal dragging on the ground work well) it will catch fire easily and burn well. Not all oil hauled in tank trains is Bakken, and there's no way for a casual observer to tell the difference when tank cars go by. So FRA and others are working on improving performance of the typical tank cars where higher-volatile oil is carried and an incident happens (takes a while to have an effect but things will improve). Even without that, though, trains are a reasonably safe and economically effective way to move the stuff. The alternative (at least for California) is to ship in oil by tanker, which is environmentally much worse in many ways and is one of the reasons why our gas prices have been persistently high.

Cheers....