(The following story by Hanneke Brooymans appeared on The Edmonton Journal website on March 1.)
EDMONTON — Transport Canada says CN has been operating in an unsafe manner since last September and has yet to reassure the department it has adequately addressed safety concerns.
In letters sent to the railway company last September, railway safety inspector Pierre LeFort said “… it is my opinion that an immediate threat to safe railway operations exists.”
CN’s problems date from 2002, when the department issued an enforcement order called a “notice and order.” The department was concerned about recurring instances of trains leaving terminals with inaccurate car counts, car sequences, train lengths and tonnages.
The September 2005 letter to CN executive vice-president Ed Harris said: “Transport Canada continues to receive complaints from CN employees and senior union officials describing numerous instances of trains departing terminals without accurate journals.”
LeFort listed eight examples from across the country, five from the first nine days of September 2005, about one month after a CN derailment spilled oil at Wabamun Lake.
Two instances were from Edmonton. In one, the train had two added cars and two cars out of sequence, problems which weren’t discovered until it arrived in Jasper.
The other example said reports from Edmonton’s Walker Yard between Dec. 2004 and April 2005 continued to show numerous instances of added cars and inaccuracies, including on trains with dangerous-goods cars.
CN assured Transport Canada the safety concerns raised in 2002 would be addressed.
But routine monitoring and nationwide audits showed the problem persisted, LeFort wrote. He issued a new notice and order on September 14, 2005.
Accidents can occur if trains are longer than expected, said Cathy Cossaboom, a Transport Canada spokeswoman.
It’s also vital for emergency responders to know the contents of each train car if there is a derailment.
CN spokesman Mark Hallman said the company met with Transport Canada and the Dangerous Goods Directorate a week ago to ask the department to rescind its notice and order.
“CN has considerably improved the human element in recording train makeup,” Hallman said. “Train journals are now 97-to 98-per-cent accurate. This has been achieved through the use of camera systems, audits and blitzes in CN’s major yards, and driving down of accountability to the employee responsible for making up a train at origin and reporting its makeup.”
The company uses electronic scanners to check trains after they leave a rail yard, Hallman said. When the train has passed the scanner, a comparison is made between the actual train makeup and the makeup report provided to the crew. If a deviation is found, a clerk charged with ensuring train list integrity receives a colour-coded alarm highlighting the inaccuracy.
“We just feel the safety actions they’ve proposed at this point do not completely get rid of the safety concerns we have,” Cossaboom said Tuesday.
A company that doesn’t comply with a notice and order can be taken to court, she said.
Notice and order documents are not generally released to the public. The Journal obtained the CN documents from NDP environment critic David Eggen.