If there are no atheists in foxholes, then there should now be no climate skeptics left among Canadian railroaders, as they move rapidly on what they do best: rebuild to keep the trains running.
Food and toilet paper have been stripped from grocery store shelves across British Columbia as panic buying follows the realization Wednesday, Nov. 17 that the previous day’s Biblical flooding means road and rail connections with Vancouver and southwestern British Columbia could be disrupted for months.
A glimpse of actual progress teased the passenger rail industry July 6 when the Canadian government unveiled previously obscure details of its long-running High Frequency Rail (HFR) program.
RAILWAY AGE, FEBRUARY 2021 ISSUE: First steam. Then Electric. Then diesel. Then batteries. Next: Hydrogen fuel cells?
Canada wants to bring back steam to its railways, but don’t expect the return of glorious white plumes of condensation, drifting over deep-frozen prairies. This time, the steam would be the invisible exhaust of high-efficiency locomotives and self-propelled passenger units, powered by the on-board conversion of hydrogen into electricity and hot water vapor. Canada hopes to build upon its advantage as builder of the world’s first HFC (hydrogen fuel cell) prime-mover.
In a desperately irrational move at the end of its term in the winter of 2019, Alberta’s former NDP (New Democratic Party) government tried to defy Economics 101 by dramatically increasing crude-by-rail capacity in order to raise prices. Nobody outside former Premier Rachel Notley’s statist brain trust thought that was a good idea. Especially not the railways: CN and Canadian Pacific both insisted that the government commit to paying the $C3.7 billion contract price, whether or not the trains were needed. In the event, “or not” turned out to be a very wise condition for the railways.
Hard-to-detect braking system defects have rendered Canada’s aging fleet of grain hoppers a safety hazard, says a former director of derailment investigations for the country’s Transportation Safety Board (TSB), the Canadian equivalent of the U.S. NTSB. Ian Naish, who retired from the TSB in 2009, in a CBC interview posted May 15, declared, “The grain car fleet overall is quite defective.”
As Canadian First Nations protesters disrupted the flow of freight and passengers across Canada, global mining giant Teck Resources jettisoned a C$20 billion project to squeeze more low-grade crude oil from the vast tar sands of northern Alberta.
Within the space of a week, CBR (crude by rail), as well a pipeline-transported oil, has mushroomed into one of Canada’s most pressing problems.
On Feb. 6—the second time in less than two months—a Canadian Pacific tank car train carrying Alberta bitumen diluted with highly volatile petroleum gases derailed near the tiny town of Guernsey, Sask. The derailment created an explosive fire and prompted the evacuation of more than 80 nearby residents.