(The following report appeared on the Montgomery Advertiser website on August 21.)
MONTGOMERY, Ala. — A railroad company that had a train derailment near Selma this weekend has had more accidents in the first five months of this year than it did for all of 2002-2005.
The Federal Railroad Administration is investigating Meridian & Bigbee Railroad’s safety operations not just because of this weekend’s derailment in Selma, but because of its overall safety performance.
This year the MNBR had 12 accidents by the end of May, including seven derailments. A May 2 derailment near Myrtlewood involved a train carrying parts of the solid rocket booster for a NASA space shuttle.
Although that was the most highly visible accident for the company, it wasn’t the last that would garner major attention. An MNBR train derailed over the weekend near Selma, with 17 cars leaving the track.
Walter Flatau, an FRA spokesman, said his organization is giving MNBR special attention.
“We did send a field investigator to look into it,” he said. “We are going to take a look at the safety of that railroad to determine if there is anything they can do to improve their safety performance.”
Flatau said the FRA already was taking a closer look at the railroad before Sunday’s accident.
“We have been looking at their safety performance,” he said.
Flatau noted the accident involving the space shuttle train, in which a bridge collapsed under a train, is still under investigation.
“This just raises more questions about the status of their infrastructure,” he said.
The FRA does not have a deadline, or even a timetable, for its investigation, Flatau said.
Mike Williams, a spokesman for Genesee and Wyoming, MNBR’s corporate parent, blamed the most recent accident on a broken rail.
Genesee and Wyoming bought MNBR in 2005, and the railroad’s reported accidents started rising at the same time.
Flatau said some railroads do a better job of reporting accidents than others, so he couldn’t say if MNBR’s rise in accidents was a result of better reporting or a sign that safety was slipping at the railroad.
“The reporting may have improved,” he said, adding that the figures could result from any number of factors.
In any event, MNBR’s accident rate has climbed precipitously after Genesee and Wyoming acquired the carrier.
The company reported seven accidents in 2005, or 47.9 per million train miles. MNBR reported 21 accidents last year, or 90.8 per million train miles.
This year’s 12 accidents represent 117.6 per million train miles.
All of those rates are higher than industry rates, both for all railroads and for Class III lines, which are companies with fewer than 400,000 man hours worked yearly.
The national average is 14.7 accidents per million train miles. It is 35.9 for Class III lines.
CSX, the largest operator in the Montgomery area, has a rate of just 11.6 accidents per million train miles.
Williams insisted the railroad is safe and is working to make itself safer.
“It is being upgraded,” he said. “We have spent $10 million since we acquired that railroad, and that work continues.”
He blamed MNBR’s jump in accidents on an increase in traffic.
“A lot of track in the Mobile-to-New Orleans corridor was washed out by (Hurricane) Katrina in 2005,” Williams said. “The M&B became a reroute for a lot of that traffic.”
FRA numbers do show a significant increase in traffic on the line, starting in 2004. The railroad reported 44,938 train miles in 2003, but that jumped to 112,116 the next year and 146,132 in 2005. Last year MNBR lines carried 231,295 train miles.
The railroad carried 102,069 train miles through the first five months of this year.
Flatau cautioned that an increased accident rate does not mean a railroad is inherently unsafe to the public. He pointed out that most railroad accidents involve train-vehicle collisions or accidents within rail yards, usually far from the public.
Neither seems to be the case with MNBR, according to federal numbers.
The railroad reported only two derailments from 1997-2004, but had three in 2005 and 16 last year. Seven of the 12 accidents in the first five months this year were derailments.
Train-vehicle accidents have been, and remain, fairly unusual for MNBR trains. The railroad had just 13 such accidents between 1997 and 2006. It has had only one the first five months of this year.
Work continued Monday to clean up the wreckage from a freight train that went off the tracks Sunday in Dallas County, briefly closing roads as authorities worried about hazardous material on the derailed cars. Sunday’s derailment involved 17 M&B Railroad cars that were carrying vinyl chloride.
Dallas County Emergency Management Agency officials and railroad representatives briefly considered evacuating nearby residents because vinyl chloride gas can be extremely flammable and unstable. But ultimately no evacuation was ordered.