nevermind
Random things to add (sorry of some of these things are repetitive):
The MM&A runs with ONE man crews - something the Class I railroads in the US have wanted to do for years.
Supposedly the person from the railroad who showed up at the earlier loco fire was a yard worker, not an engineer, and may not have known how to secure the engine, or that it needed to be running to keep up the air pressure.
GE locomotives have a history of catching on fire
The engineer, who was woken by the blast, found a trackmobile in town, went to the wreck site, and started pulling cars that were still on the rails away from the wreck. Pretty brave thing to do (and it took a few trips, because trackmobiles aren’t that powerful).
Trainorders.com has a Canadian Railroads forum that is following this pretty heavily, as you might expect.
Enough news has now escaped to form a tentative hypothesis. What follows is mostly what has been reported on the CBC, my comments in [brackets].
The oil was from ND [not especially relevant] and the railroad, the Montreal, Maine, and Atlantic, is a US road. Some years ago, they got permission [presumably from both countries] to operate with one crewman.
Who obviously has to stop and rest. And did, registering in a hotel about 15 miles from Lac Megantic. Regulations require that aside from the air brakes, which will dissipate if the engine is turned off, the engineer set a “sufficient number” of hand brakes. Each locomotive and each car has a hand brake. To set one (and remove it when the train restarts) requires climbing up a ladder on the side of the car and turn a wheel. [This would seem to take a couple minutes per car.] The engineer is required to test that sufficiently many [which presumably depends only on the slope] by going to a locomotive, taking the air brakes off completely and applying gentle power–enough to simulate a heavy breeze–and seeing that train not move. So far the only news that has reported on this says that the hand brakes were set on all five locomotives, but nothing has been said about the cars.
The engineer, left one engine running and went off to the hotel. At some later time, there was a fire in that engine. The local fire department came and put the fire out and then turned the engine off. They had had joint training with train crew so that they knew how do that. A fireman said that they knew nothing about brakes. A RR employee came after the fire, but he was not an engineer. Nor did he wake the engineer.
The cars were old and are gradually being replaced by better [safer?] ones, but are evidently still in service. The tracks go right through the centers of these towns, no surprise since the towns were built around the RR [which, I think, no longer stops at any of them].
Unanswered questions (so far). Did the engineer adhere to the regulations about setting sufficiently many hand brakes and did he test this. Or did he just figure that leaving one locomotive running to keep the air compressors running was enough, along with the hand brakes on all five locomotives? What caused the fire on the locomotive that was left running? Why were the firemen instructed how to turn the locomotives off but not in the dangers of doing so? And, most importantly of all, how were these cars full of heavy crude so explosive? In general, even diesel fuel is hard to light (that’s why truck drivers often leave their engines running all night in cold weather); heavy crude ought to be harder.
The “Parliamentary Secretary” to the Minister of Transport was interviewed on CBC this morning. He had probably spent the last three days being tutored in the art of not answering questions by going off on an irrelevant tangent. A mayor of a nearby town (Magog) had said that when she asked the RR about the kind of cargo going through her town, they declined to answer. The Parliamentary Secretary said that RRs were required to notify towns. But then added that crude oil is not considered a dangerous cargo. When asked about one-man crews he went into a long song and dance about setting hand brakes. When asked about the older tanker cars, he ignored the question and went on and on about the newer ones that were coming.
The president of the RR came to town this morning. Until this morning he had insisted there was no negligence on the part of the RR (if he meant they had fulfilled all their legal obligations, why didn’t he say that?) This morning he admitted that there was maybe some responsibility on their part.
Like most such accidents, it is almost certain to be due to a concatenation of circumstances, no one of which was fatal, but combined to produce a disaster.
The oil being from North Dakota may be relevant in that the oil coming out of the Bakken is not particularly heavy-- it’s actually pretty similar to the West Texas Intermediate which is one of the lighter benchmark crudes. The heavier tar sands crude may be less volatile.
As for the explosiveness, see my post above-- the crude itself isn’t very explosive (although it is plenty flammable) but the gasses and vapors that come off it are. If you look at the railcar specs scr4 posted and run it with a crude weight of around 7 pounds per gallon (roughly 40 API density units), you’ll find that the cars can’t quite be filled all the way without being overweight so there’s space for explosive gasses and vapor to accumulate.
"…The mainline track on which the train was traveling remained relatively intact, he said, but a side track, known as a “storage track,” was torn apart by an explosion at the point where the mainline curves, said Burkholder…
He said it appears that the train derailed at the curve and slammed into railroad cars carrying liquid propane. He said a Lac-Megantic resident, a “rail fan” who monitors activity at the yard, told him that he saw four propane cars Friday on the same storage track…
He said liquid propane is transported under pressure and is more likely than crude oil to create the kind of explosion that destroyed much of downtown Lac-Megantic."
That would explain a lot.
Essentially 4 FAE bombs to explode, generating enough heat to light the crude, which burns. There are no words for those poor people. 
The propane does answer much.
The fire was visible from space!
There’s a satellite that passes over Lac-Mégantic every couple of days. It happened to pass around 1 am when the fire was burning and took a picture; it made a similar pass a few days earlier at about the same time: NASA image shows intensity of deadly Lac-Megantic derailment
The picture on the left shows Lac-Mégantic a few days before as a little dot, needing an arrow to point it out; the picture on the right is the night of the fire…
Here’s my understanding:
In older trains, the pressure in the air hose does 2 things: it keeps the air reservoir on each car topped off, and it keeps the brakes off. When the pressure drops, this causes the brakes to be applied, powered by the air reservoir. So it’s the air pressure in the reservoir that’s pressing those brake shoes against the wheels. The system is fail-safe; if a car gets disconnected from the train, the air hose loses pressure, and the air reservoir on that car applies the brakes.
The problem is, air reservoirs leak out over time. So the air brakes are good for stopping the train, but not for keeping it stopped for hours. That’s why rail cars have hand brakes for use as parking brakes.
Brakes on modern trains work the same way, except they have an additional air hose. This line is pressurized all the time the engine is running, and all it does is keep the air reservoirs topped off. The brakes are still activated by dropping pressure on the primary air line. But with pressure on the 2nd line, they can keep the air brakes applied all night, as long as the engine is kept running. Of course, if the engine is stopped, it’s just like the older system: the air leaks out over time (hours?), and the brakes lose power.
Why don’t rail cars such as the ones transporting the crude oil have some kind of ventilation system to keep dangerous gases from accumulating in them?
Because oil vapor is a pollutant. Un-burnt (or incompletely burnt) fossil fuel is a major source of smog, which is why gas tanks on cars are designed to trap gasoline vapor and not let any of it escape into the air. Same with gas station pumps, they are designed to capture gasoline vapor.
Also, ventilating the tank may end up making the vapor more explosive, by adding air (oxygen).
That’s kinda what I figured (that it’s a pollutant) but in a scenario like this I also thought maybe the pros outweighed the cons. I hadn’t thought of oxygen introduction, but even then I am sure we have equipment to get around that such as a one-way valve that can expel small amounts of this gas at periodic intervals during a freight trip to keep the pressure from getting excessive.
But that brings up another stumbling block even if said system were feasible and not overtly polluting: cost.
The obvious solution is to design tanker cars specifically for hauling crude oil that are sized so they can be filled to the brim leaving no air space in which fumes can accumulate. That means, however, that you can’t use your general-use tankers for oil, and that reduces your flexibility and so costs money.
If the violent explosion was caused by a collision with parked propane-carrying cars, redesign of the cars carrying crude oil isn’t likely to help much.
I also wondered why such a dangerous cargo was left on a siding. Seems to me stuff like that should reach its final destination and be off loaded right away rather than be parked somewhere waiting for some other train at a later time.
Insufficient brake force blamed in Canada crash
http://news.yahoo.com/insufficient-brake-force-blamed-canada-crash-153854486.html
Might as well of blamed it on gravity. We KNOW the brakes didn’t hold. The question is WHY?
I think the engineer expected the airbrakes to hold the train–but the engine was shut off after the engine caught on fire–so the airbrakes failed an hour or so later–because the air slowly leaked out. Because he expected the airbrakes to hold the train he set an inadequate number of handbrakes (there are handbrakes on each locomotive and car–it probably takes a couple minutes to set each one–you climb up and mechanically turn a wheel). The sooner he got through setting brakes the quicker he could go to the motel and go to sleep. Or it may have been that he set all the airbrakes that the railroad recommended–but the advice was faulty.
I haven’t heard anything more about the propane cars - was that ever definitively
confirmed?