VANCOUVER—A longtime Canadian Pacific Railway engineer in Revelstoke, B.C., said he’s concerned but not surprised that a CP manager was found guilty of ordering a train with potentially explosive freight to be left on a hill without applying a handbrake.

The July 16 guilty verdict in connection with the incident, which took place near Revelstoke, came just over a week after the fifth anniversary of a deadly train derailment in Lac-Mégantic, Que. An unattended 74-car train carrying crude oil rolled downhill, derailed and exploded in the town, killing 47 people.

“Since Lac-Mégantic, if there is a train tied down unattended, it has to have hand brakes applied,” said the train engineer, who has worked at the company for several decades, speaking on condition of anonymity because he’s forbidden from talking to the media.

“Not even for a second are you supposed to leave it unattended,” he said.

“It was a huge Transport Canada cardinal rule violation. It’s just a no-no. Any one of us would be fired in a heartbeat if we did that.”

In his ruling, provincial court Justice Richard Hewson found that the cars — several of which carried potentially explosive ammonium nitrate and oil — were secured only with emergency brakes.

The 58 train cars involved in the Feb. 15, 2015 incident were parked on a double-track siding east of Revelstoke in the early morning — just hours after CP workers had voted overwhelmingly to go on strike. The vote meant managers had to move any trains that were not secured before workers walked off the job.

That violated Canada’s post-Lac-Mégantic “emergency directive” ordering all unattended trains to use hand brakes and derailing devices on the tracks, Hewson ruled.

Testimony from the train’s crew and phone conversation records heard in court revealed that managers called subordinates “idiots” for their reluctance to leave the train without engaging the legally required hand brake.

In one phone recording, an “unknown” CP employee called to say, “I’ve left a train on a hill going up to Notch Hill in emergency.”

Calgary-based dispatch director Tim McClelland then phoned regional CP superintendent Mark Jackson and said, “We’re reducing a bunch of dangerous — dangerous stuff into Greely ... just because the yard is friggin’ plugged.” (Greely, a two-track siding where trains can pass each other, is roughly 10 kilometres east uphill from Revelstoke, a town of about 6,700 people.)

McClelland then said, “Now, of course, they’re saying, ‘We’re gonna tie on 40 hand brakes,’” to which Jackson replied, “No, no, no, no, no. ... He’s being stupid. ... Who’s the crew?”

When McClelland told him the names of two crew members on the train, Jackson replied, “Yeah, two idiots.” McClelland later “appeared to give instructions to a third person,” and told Jackson, “He asks one hundred and one questions. Can’t do this, can’t do that, let’s do this, let’s do that.”

Hewson found McClelland guilty on July 16, ruling that he “did not exercise all due diligence to prevent the commission of the offences.”

But in the same decision, Hewson acquitted McClelland’s co-accused, Jackson, who is has been employed by Cando Rail Services since early 2016.

In an email, the company said it is pleased with the verdict.

“CP is pleased with the decision of the court acquitting CP of the contravention of the Ministerial Directive and the Railway Safety Act,” spokesperson Andy Cummings said.

According to the CP engineer interviewed, the workers’ strike created a situation in which company managers appeared to be trying to save time as they did the work of striking staff.

“They literally were tying it down because the strike was engaging and managers said they’d be out there and on it right away anyways,” the source recalled. “They got busted because it was all on the radio.

“They were being belittled and their job was being threatened because they said, ‘No we can’t do that.’ ... Tying it down would take 20 minutes, they just wanted to save that 20 minutes so that when they came out there, they wouldn’t have to untie it and could just keep the trains a-rollin’.”

The engineer said the hill down to Revelstoke reaches a 1.06 per cent gradient closer to the city limits. According to diagrams reviewed by StarMetro, it turns a sharp corner before entering the east side of the city. It is largely an industrial area, the source said, but there is a residential trailer park there.

“It’s a tight corner which goes from 35-miles-per-hour to 20-miles-per-hour speed change,” the source said. “The chances were that nothing was going to happen — one-in-a-million that it would roll away.

“In my professional opinion, it would probably roll slowly from Greely, down the grade, it would pick up a little speed around that corner because it gets steep, and might roll up to 30 miles per hour through town. I don’t think it would derail.”

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But the source alleged that it was an example of “cutting corners” — something he has seen in other instances — in what he called CP’s push for higher “productivity,” and noted he believed it could happen again.

“I don’t think anyone was in danger,” he said. “But it’s the fact that this happens all the time, but they got caught. They’re cutting corners.”

Asked about such allegations of cost-cutting and systemic issues affecting safety, CP stated in an email: “CP takes safety very seriously and the court found CP acted with due diligence.”

According to political scientist Mark Winfield, a rail safety regulatory regime expert, the Revelstoke incident is just one in a “whole string” of near misses and more remote derailments across the Canadian sector — and he argued that post-Lac-Mégantic reforms have simply “doubled down” on a “hopeless inadequate” oversight system by regulators.

“Five years after Lac-Mégantic, there are fundamental questions that remain about the effectiveness of Canada’s railway safety regulatory regime; it needs to be rethought at a fundamental level,” he said in a phone interview. “The existing regime isn’t working very well.

“It allowed Lac-Mégantic to happen and a whole lot of other accidents as well. That’s hardly a ringing endorsement.”

Winfield said federal regulators are “way too skewed in the direction of overseeing self-regulation” of private-sector operators, although he acknowledged that at least enforcement has been “somewhat stronger” since 2015.

According to Teamsters Canada’s spokesperson Stéphane Lacroix, the Lac-Mégantic tragedy “still resonates” five years later, but the government has failed to act on systemic issues, despite measures to replace oil cars with safer models and install surveillance cameras on crew.

“If the government wants to do an effective job of protecting the health and safety of workers and the public, it should no longer allow rail carriers to be self-regulated,” Lacroix wrote on the union’s website this month. “On the contrary, Transport Canada must hire enough resources to conduct the necessary inspections and enforce existing laws.

“Rail safety in this country must not be left in corporate hands.”

University of British Columbia engineering professor Gordon Lovegrove, who is principal investigator of the Sustainable Transport Safety Research Laboratory, said what happened in Lac-Mégantic was a case of “human error” that galvanized important safety improvements across the board.

“Everybody had the bar raised, and all railways must comply,” he said. “Engineers have learned by mistakes made at Lac-Mégantic — for example, the design of the tanker vessel was not as good as it could be, those have been improved. The braking application manually and reporting dangerous freight to municipalities, all these things have been improved because of that mistake.”

Winfield countered that focusing on individual mistakes — and the actions of individual employees, such as three crew of the Lac-Mégantic train acquitted in January — misses the point and could put the public at risk.

“When charges are laid, it’s usually the front-line employees who then get blamed for decisions that fundamentally got made at the management and business strategy level — staff get blamed for having cut corners,” he said. “But they rarely look at the managerial context in which those choices were made.

“(In Revelstoke) the decisions that supervisor of dispatch was making were still fundamentally choices made at the management level far, far above that individual. The pressure was on him to maximize efficiency.”

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