(The following article by Brian Barker was posted on Portland, Oregon television station KATU’s website on April 6.)
VANCOUVER, Wash. – A train derailment in Vancouver Wednesday morning is raising concerns about whether remote-controlled trains are safe.
Jet Ranger 2 flew over the derailment Wednesday morning and from the air, you could see several cars had run off the tracks, including the type of car that typically carries chemicals.
Other than the mess left behind, the incident was a minor one – it happened in a train yard, did not impact the main railroad lines, nothing spilled and no one was injured.
However, the derailment does raise concerns about trains like it that are operated by remote control.
One of the big concerns is that if the person operating the remote control is at one end of the train, they cannot tell what’s going on at the other end.
“If it’s remote-controlled, you don’t have that sense of feeling that there is a problem,” said Joe Hilsinger, a railroad enthusiast. “You just keep pushing and pushing and pushing without knowing that there is a problem.”
Without someone in the locomotive, engineers say a wreck like the one that happened in Vancouver could easily turn into a deadly chemical spill.
“Within their limitations, they are perfectly safe,” said Richard Samuels with Oregon Pacific Railroad.
Samuels owns one of the area’s only short line railroads and says the big railroads use remote-controlled trains because they save money.
“If you tell the locomotive to do 15 miles an hour and you’re shoving some cars and some of them go on the ground, that locomotive is going to shove those cars sideways at 15 miles an hour until the guy operating the locomotive tells them not to,” said Samuels.
No one from the railroad responsible for the cars that derailed would speak to KATU News on camera.
The Federal Railroad Association did do a study on remote-controlled locomotives and concluded that they actually led to a 13 percent decrease in accidents in rail yards.
To see photos of this accident, go to:
http://www.katu.com/team2/story.asp?ID=84822