This story was published July 9, 2013.

MONTREAL — Deregulation of Canada’s railroads has led to reduced oversight of train safety and maintenance, the union representing 75 workers for Montreal, Maine & Atlantic Railway charged Tuesday.

“Since they deregulated, you’ve had one person on the trains, you have trains unattended, you have maintenance that is not done on the railways,” said Guy Farrell, assistant director of the United Steelworkers Union in Quebec. “This is one of the impacts of privatization.”

The union’s comments follow growing questions over the safety of the country’s freight operations after the derailment of a runaway train in Lac-Mégantic early Saturday. The tragedy comes at a time when freight trains are increasingly being used to transport such dangerous goods as oil.

Freight trains make up 95 per cent of the estimated $10 billion per year generated by the country’s rail transport industry, Transport Canada data show.

The union has questioned MMA’s practice of using just one locomotive engineer — as opposed to staffing freight trains with at least one engineer and one conductor.

While many Canadian commuter trains have just one driver, only two railways in Canada have sought and obtained permission from Transport Canada to use one-man crews: the MMA, and the Quebec North Shore and Labrador Railway, which runs 414 kilometres through northeastern Quebec and western Labrador.

Locomotive engineer Tom Harding had left the parked train, which carried 72 tankers filled with crude oil, before it rolled into the town centre, where four of the cars exploded.

Farrell could not say how much more it would cost to use a two-man crew, per trip, although he noted that a locomotive engineer earns about $70,000 a year on average.

Rob Johnston, a rail manager in the investigations branch of Canada’s Transportation Safety Board, said it is not uncommon to leave a train idling alone.

“It varies from company to company and as long as they meet the regulations ... and it can be done safely, it can be done,” Johnston said. “That’s a common practice in the industry.”

The MMA’s safety record also came under scrutiny this week when U.S. data published in the Wall Street Journal showed 34.7 accidents per million miles travelled compared with the national average of 2.3 accidents.

In Canada, TSB rail incident data released Tuesday showed that the MMA railway had eight incidents during the first half of 2013 — excluding Lac-Mégantic — up from six incidents for all of 2012. That compares with the 23 accidents that took place when the railway started operating in 2003.

In 2012, there were 1,012 incidents reported in Canada and 82 fatalities.

But unlike the U.S. authority, the TSB doesn’t track per-mile data for non-major train lines and couldn’t provide a national average for comparison. The MMA’s website said the rail moves 15 trains a week, but didn’t specify how its volume has changed over the last decade.

“Maybe their traffic has changed from what they used to be carrying, but again, I don’t have the numbers to verify that,” Johnston said, referring to the larger number of incidents during the rail’s first three years of operation.

“These are definitely not of the same type of accident that we experienced in the last week here,” he said. Those accidents are mostly non-main track derailments, a common occurrence, he said. “It doesn’t seem unreasonable.”

alampert@montrealgazette.com



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