While the general news media is feeding the public with sensational reports about the Lac-Megantic derailment and its fiery aftermath, and preemptively seeks to place blame for this incident, many of us associated with the rail industry are vitally concerned with knowing how all this happened, and what can be done to prevent such accidents in the future.
Notwithstanding operating rules requirements for applying sufficient number of handbrakes to a standing train to ensure it is securely held against movement, it appears to me that some other factors likely contributed to this runaway incident.
I'd been pondering how an MMA engineer-conductor (one-man crew) could dismount from a locomotive to walk the train and knock off car handbrakes without risking a roll-away incident (such as happened on CSX in Toledo, Ohio during 2001). Of course, one-man operation requires a remote control packset - duh!
Here is a link about MM&A remote control operations of trains transporting crude oil, [www.easternrailroadnews.com]
Now I've heard rumors about unintended movement of remote controlled locos and/or DPUs in yards due to RC equipment erroneously linking (or pairing) with RC controllers on other trains. Anyone here on Altamont Press who can substantiate such rumors?
In the Lac-Megantic incident, I wonder how the RC packset associated with a train is transferred from incoming engineer to outgoing engineer. Could the action of a firemen/MoW employee shutting down the lead locomotive have caused the train's RC equipment to fail in an unsafe manner? Perhaps RC protocols and radio channel filters within remote control electronics of MM&A locos and "robot cars" are not robust enough to discriminate against interfence from other radio transmitters, such as the two-way radios used by a volunteer fire department that came on the scene to extinguish the fire in a locomotive engine compartment, It seems the train was standing still for some time while tied down for its crew change, and that later on something or other happened to initiate this roll-away incident.
Remote control is a new technology that may yet have some bugs to be worked out ... it will be interesting to learn from what Transport Canada investigators and MM&A railway officials will report about the RC aspects of this train and incident.