Rail wins

(This blog was written a few days ago.
Now, interestingly, as I begin keying it in, a gigantic disaster has occurred in Quebec not far from the Maine border involving a crude-oil train.
Proving yet again the old saw “If anything can go wrong, it will.
Apparently the train ran away untended after being parked, cars derailed, then four tankcars leaked crude into the town’s sewer-system destroying much of the town when the crude caught fire.
This puts the kibosh on the allegedly enviable safety-record of railroad crude-oil delivery.
At least it wasn’t an ethanol-train, but the fact this happened makes crude-oil trains look bad.
Proponents of the Keystone Pipeline could have a field-day.
If that pipeline caught fire out in the middle of nowhere, it wouldn’t destroy a town, which many railroads go through.
Railroads are pretty safe any more, but accidents happen.
The crude was labeled “toxic” in news reports, which it is, but it wasn’t a giant release of chlorine, which would gas people.
But it did catch fire.
Tragic as this disaster was, I doubt the Keystone Pipeline will be built, that oil-refineries will move away from crude-oil trains.
Railroad operation will just have to be made safer, if that’s possible.
And the tankcars made more crash-proof [less likely to rupture].
I saw an aerial-view of the crash-site. Tankcars were piled up like an accordion.
We used to have a rule at Transit. The only way to stop a bus was kill it.
Just because the shift-lever was in neutral didn’t mean the tranny was. A bus in neutral could take off on its own and take out a wall.
The only way to avoid such a calamity was shut the thing off.
No doubt the brakes were set on this parked train, but something took them off.
Should a train go untended?
One time I saw a train stop on Track Two in Gallitzin, PA [“guh-LIT-zin;” as in “get”] before entering the tunnel and descending The Hill into Altoona.
An engineman got off to pick up a sandwich at a nearby delicatessen.
But the engineer was still in the cab. The sandwich-guy was probably the conductor.
If the train started running away, the engineer was still in position.)


(Photo by Justin Sullivan - Getty images.)

A lot of continental crude-oil is gravitating toward shipment via railroad.
It’s not because the Keystone Pipeline wasn’t built, as I thought.
It’s happening because the refineries decided shipment via rail makes more sense.
Shipment via pipeline would be slightly less expensive.
But pipeline is not as flexible, and pipeline shipment has other problems.
Building a new pipeline required eminent-domain to establish a right-of-way. Railroad right-of-ways already exist.
And of course there are many more of them.
Shipping to various locations is fairly easy.
The Keystone Pipeline was not as flexible. Crude shipped by it had a specific route. To get to its final refinery it needed to be transshipped.
In which case you engage the railroads anyway, or another pipeline.
Another problem is the pipeline needed to be primed. You gotta prime it with crude to begin shipping crude.
Yet another problem is the nature of what’s to be shipped.
Some crude is bitumen, thick tar-sands, that won’t flow through a pipeline unless diluted, in which case the refiner has to get out the dilutant.
Shipment of bitumen can be done undiluted via railroad tankcar.
It may take steam-heat to drain the tankcar, but the refiner is not removing dilutant.
Oil-refineries all over the nation are jumping on the bandwagon.
Bakken crude, extracted on North Dakota, is being shipped in unit-trains to the final refinery.
Using Bakken crude and bitumen gets away from using imported crude.
A younger brother works in an oil-refinery in northern Delaware.
It’s the same oil-refinery my father worked in.
It opened in 1956, and was designed to process sour crude, heavy with sulfur.
It received its crude in tanker-ships.
That refinery opened as “Flying-A,” and has since been through at least six, maybe seven, different owners, including Texaco and Valero.
Valero closed it, but PBF Energy rook it over and restarted it.
That refinery has since installed vast railroad unloading facilities.
Trainloads of Bakken crude arrive and feed the refinery.
Bitumen feeds the refinery too.
Refineries all over the nation are doing this.
The Keystone Pipeline project has become kind of moot.
Pipeline proponents have taken to criticizing the environmental impact of railroads versus pipelines, but their statistics are skewed.
The pipeline proponents play the environmental card because refineries are going with railroads.
The pipeline proponents documented every railroad spill down to five-gallons, yet didn’t include five-gallon spills in pipeline advocacy.
Trainloads of crude are crossing populated areas, and the populace can get up-in-arms.
A couple weeks ago I viewed online video of a long crude-oil train crossing Lancaster County in southeastern PA.
That video was allied with a newspaper-article that sounded the alarm.
Did they have any idea what more dangerous stuff is traversing their county?
A crude-oil train is not a trainload of propane or ethanol.
Crude is flammable, but it won’t explode. Disregard the news-reports.
If a trainload of chlorine wrecked it would gas the populace.

• “Transit” equals Regional Transit Service, the public transit-bus operator in Rochester, NY, where I drove transit-bus for 16&1/2 years (1977-1993). My stroke October 26, 1993 ended that. I retired on medical-disability. (I pretty much recovered.)
• “Tranny” is transmission.