(The following article by Brent Hunsberger was posted on the Oregonian website on May 11.)
PORTLAND, Ore. — Shortly after sundown on Jan. 23, as rush hour drew to a close, almost 1,900 tons of lumber-laden freight cars rolled out of Union Pacific’s Southeast Portland railyard on a train with no engine and no engineer. Nobody noticed.
The 17 railcars kept going for more than two miles, traveling at about 11 miles per hour down a main rail line used by Amtrak, past at least 20 public rail crossings — some of them ungated — and the warehouses and restaurants of inner Southeast Portland.
They came to rest on a curved stretch of tracks under the Broadway Bridge, where a surprised Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway crew found them minutes later in the path of their freight train, stunning railroad managers.
“I just went, wow, wow, wow,” Richard Wright, Union Pacific’s local yard manager, told an investigator later, according to a 340-page transcript of the railroad’s internal investigation obtained by The Oregonian.
The fact that the cars had left the railyard and rolled so far, Wright said, “was just hard to grasp.”
At the heart of the incident lies a relatively new technology increasingly being used in railyards nationwide: remotely controlled switch-engines. A remote, as the systems are called, pushes train cars around a site without requiring an engineer in the locomotive, and probably propelled the unmanned railcars out of the Portland railyard in January.
The Federal Railroad Administration, which regulates railroad safety, will wade into a growing debate about the technology this week when it releases a preliminary safety audit. Agency spokesman Warren Flatau declined to detail the audit’s findings, which had been requested by Congress, but said, “At this juncture, the preliminary data suggest nominal safety improvements at some locations.”
Remotely operated locomotives have been used in industrial settings for years. They became more popular with large railroad companies after the Canadian National Railway Co. developed its own technology and began using it in its Canadian switching yards in the mid-1990s.
The remotes normally are operated by a crew of two, a foreman and switchman, instead of a three-member crew led by a train engineer.
One or both workers wear a “beltpack” the size of a toaster that sends signals to a centrally located computer, which then signals a receiver in the locomotive. Safety features built into the Beltpack are designed to halt the engine if the operator falls over or if communication is somehow blocked, Canadian National officials say.
Railway cites improvements
Canadian National spokesman Mark Hallman said the technology has halved the railroad’s equipment accident rates and improved productivity per worker by eliminating potential miscommunication between the engineer and workers on the ground.
Union members, who face job losses as railroads implement the technology, disagree with Hallman’s assessment.
Though no one was injured, the incident in Portland stoked a long-simmering dispute between union members and Union Pacific, the nation’s largest railroad, about use of the remotes.
Officials with the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen say the remotes are unsafe and are contributing to a service slowdown across Union Pacific’s 33,000-mile system. They say the incident raises concerns about the thoroughness of worker training as the railroad rushes to replace a rash of early retirees and accommodate a surge in business.
The worker at the controls during the January incident had been certified to operate a remote engine for only five days and had never before worked in that yard, according to the transcript of the subsequent investigation.
“You’re taking new employees, giving them two weeks of training . . . and they don’t know what they’ve got a hold of,” said Jeff Cheney, vice local chairman of Division 236 of the engineer’s union.
Rules violations
Union Pacific officials counter that the remote had nothing to do with the incident in Portland and note that no accident has ever been blamed on the remote control technology itself.
“The crew violated a number of operating rules . . . which would’ve happened with an engineer if they had taken the same action,” said John Bromley, a Union Pacific spokesman.
Union Pacific introduced the locomotives in its key Hinkle yard near Hermiston in 2002 and in its two major Portland yards — Albina and Brooklyn — last May. Likewise, Burlington Northern Santa Fe began using remotes at its Vancouver yard in February.
Union Pacific workers take 88 hours of classroom and field training before being qualified to operate remotes, Bromley said.
“We’re very pleased with it,” Bromley said of the technology. He said injury rates are down, though accident rates have risen slightly as workers “are getting used to” the technology.
Although all three major railroads using the system stress that no accident has ever been directly tied to a failure of the technology, operator error has played a role in accidents involving remotes.
The incident in Portland startled railroad managers and triggered an intense internal investigation, including a three-day hearing a week after the incident.
According to transcripts of the hearing, a two-man crew had moved 27 cars into a long track using a remote-controlled engine, “stretching” them to make sure they were attached properly. The newer worker then used the remote to push another string of empty cars against the existing cars, according to the investigation, operating the remote-control locomotive at about 4 miles per hour while the foreman stood nearby.
At about 6:37 p.m., during or just after the operation, 17 railcars separated from the others and rolled out of the yard. They came to rest about 10 minutes later, next to a riverside grain elevator.
Dispute over crew
In February, Union Pacific fired the crew, both members of a conductor’s union, citing negligence and rules violations, including failing to apply “sufficient number of hand brakes” to prevent unattended cars from moving. Both workers appealed and recently accepted a settlement returning them to work.
The runaways damaged several switches, costing the railroad $10,000 in repairs. But managers were more alarmed at the risk they posed to the public.
The cars traveled on tracks that carry several Amtrak trains each day and that cross Southeast 11th and 12th Avenues, both busy commuter throughways. Had a switch been lined differently, one company manager suggested during the company’s internal investigation, the cars might have crossed the Steel Bridge and entered Union Station, where passengers board Amtrak trains.
“The potential of what could have happened here was mind-boggling,” Wright, a 32-year veteran of the company, told an investigator. “The general public was at definite risk with what happened here.”