(The following story by Scott Simpson appeared on the Vancouver Sun website on November 7.)
VANCOUVER, B.C. — Overloaded freight cars, inadequate brakes and lack of training contributed to the death of one rail worker and serious injuries to three others in a 2006 derailment on one of Canada’s historic train routes, the Transportation Safety Board said Thursday.
Bruce Harder of Carcross, Yukon Territory, was killed on Sept. 3, 2006, when a work train for the White Pass & Yukon Route railway missed a sharp curve and derailed at Log Cabin, B.C.
The line originally served gold prospectors more than a century ago and since 1982 it has operated as a 110-kilometre sightseeing route from Skagway, Alaska, into B.C., primarily as a day trip for cruise-boat passengers.
The tourist season was closed on the day of the incident, and a work train was using the route to haul gravel in preparation to extend the line.
The safety board’s report shows that freight cars had been overloaded “many times before without incident” as WP&YR employees “believed that fully loaded cars could be safely handled.”
However, the train’s braking system overheated and failed on a descent down a steep grade.
“The locomotive engineer was inexperienced in handling heavy trains down mountain grades and had no company guidance on safe train-handling procedures,” the safety board said.
“In the absence of adequate instructions and training, a number of train-handling decisions were made that were inconsistent with safe practices for descending mountain grades and contributed to the loss of control.”
The board described training for WP&YR employees as “ad hoc” and said in the absence of a detailed training manual and “well-established policies and procedures, training at WP&YR was not entirely effective.”
The board noted that the B.C.-based railway has made a number of safety-procedure improvements since the incident.
“We’ve been proud of our safety record. We’ve never had an accident like this in Canada in 108 years,” railway president Gary Danielson said in a telephone interview. “I think part of our problem is that we were classified as an excursion railway and there were things that didn’t come to light . . . as to rules and regulations we were under, until after the accident.
“After the accident there were several rules and notices of order . . . and we’re proud of the work that has been done putting those into place since the accident,” Danielson said.