Freight Trains: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

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in the 19th century, the preferred method of murdering damsels today is antidepressants for middle-aged parents. Trains aren't just a means of transportation, they're beloved children's characters on shows like Thomas the Tank Engine, except that one. I'm talking about the British original narrated by Ringo Star which is much darker, take this episode where Henry the Green Engine gets scared by the rain and doesn't want to come out of a tunnel, everyone begs him and then yells at him. Thomas even tries. to push him physically and finally the head of the Railway intervenes with a drastic solution, we will take away the rails from you, he said, and we will leave you here forever and ever and ever, they took the old rails and built a wall in front of it so that Henry could no longer couldn't get out of the tunnel, yes, the British version of Thomas didn't show up and the episode whose premise is to stop complaining about work or we'll throw you in your Forever hole has to be one of the most disturbing episodes of children's television up there from the Blue's Clues episode where Blue is revealed to be the Zodiac Killer, come on Steve, the clues were a gun, a zodiac symbol, and a San Francisco Chronicle issue from 196 69 who basically wanted to get trapped and if you're thinking right, surely that was the midpoint of the episode and Henry was finally allowed out so there could be a happy ending with all his friends, that's not how it ends, he wondered if it would.

He will ever be allowed to pull

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again, but I think he deserved his punishment, don't you see? There are shows for kids and then there are shows for British kids and that's why I am and this is so true, well, we're going to be talking. about a particular type of train

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,

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trains and let me tell you that this show is a beneficial train, they are objectively good, they are fast, they are loud and they make noises like chuga chuga choo choo and ding ding ding ding ding I love them Trains and

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trains are essential, we depend on them to transport around 28% of the country's freight, and while trucks also carry freight over long distances and have some pretty successful sounds of their own, trains are much better for the environment, as they only account for 2% of US transportation emissions, but unfortunately, as we saw earlier this year in East Palestine, Ohio, when freight trains derail, they can cause immense damage.

That accident generated an estimated cost of at least $800, $103 million in total damages and 80% of residents surveyed say they have experienced headaches, rashes, coughs, eye irritation and diarrhea, and about 40 % say they suffer from PTSD, although that was a particularly unpleasant derailment, the truth is that it shouldn't have been so surprising that

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year there were over a thousand train transactions in the US, that's an average of three a day, and while most occur in the Rail Yards and are not major incidents, those that occur outside of them can cause a major disaster: the burning Inferno freight train outside of Phoenix, Arizona, derails.

On a bridge in Tempe, a derailed train in the Mojave Desert caused a disaster tonight. New dash cam video shows the moment a Norol Southern train derailed in Springfield, Ohio from Livecopter 3. An exclusive view with the trained Union Pacific train. Min. 33 cars in total 22. derailed a red substance was spilled but the officials have not confirmed what it is it seems none of it is good, but the phrase a red substance was spilled but the officials have not confirmed what it is it is really creepy it sounds less like a legitimate news report and more like the first draft of a Steven King novel, so train derailments happen frequently and experts say the reason we haven't had massive loss of life in this country like As a result, it is more luck than anything else, the railways will continue to flirt with danger.

Flirting with disaster as long as people get rich I don't want to say we dodged a bullet in East Palestine, but the next one could be in a major urban area, it could be in downtown Chicago, it could be in downtown New York. York City, it's terrifying to think that a rail disaster like the one in East Palestine could happen in New York, partly because I live here and partly because New Yorkers are dealing with enough fear and panic that we are a target of perpetual terrorism, We have the first major accident in the country. covid wave, we had a biblical lanternfly plague

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summer and there's an army of creepy Elmos running rampant in Time Square, we don't have the anxiety bandwidth to also worry about a giant train full of Po poison exploding in the middle So if freight trains have the power to cause so much damage tonight let's talk about them and start with the fact that the freight rail industry used to be heavily regulated, but in the 1970s, after the system came along Interstate highways and rail transportation lost some business to trucking, there was pressure to deregulate the industry so it could compete, and in 1980 many of the controls we had implemented were eliminated, allowing for enormous consolidation of railroad companies. to the point where, while there used to be over 100 class one railroads in North America, there are now only six huge and extremely powerful companies and much of the safety oversight is left to the Federal Railroad Administration. , which is a pretty weak regulator and it's not just me who says that a government report found that the agency itself estimates that its inspectors have the capacity to inspect less than 1% of the railway activities covered by the regulation and, as a result , the railroads themselves have primary responsibility for the safety of the rail system, and if history has taught us anything, that is not a good formula. to get positive results, if anything the formula is industry plus deregulation minus government oversight equals Last Week Tonight episode and guess what guys, here we are, although I will give some credit to fr8 because they produce some spectacular rail safety videos to show them what not to do. around the train tracks shoot I think the car just died h seriously this is not happening why do we stop?

What happened? We're trapped? Okay, we'll just sit here for a minute and I'll call someone, but what if there's a train? You come, don't worry, there is never a train here and I'm sure we would hear it when you come from far away. What are you doing? It's hard to pick a favorite reaction from the calmest or dumbest mom in the world. I think the car just died. When Your Car Clearly Died is an obvious Hall of Famer, but for my money I'm going to go with absolute blind confidence that there will never be a train here, a fact she can't know and doesn't seem to believe herself either, and this is Not very important, but I will call someone who exactly you think you would call and what you think that call would be like.

Hello, my car broke down on some train tracks. I'm in the car with my kids, get out of the car. and off the tracks, I'm pretty sure there's never a train here, because trains usually go where the tracks are. Put one of your children on the phone. Are you going to send someone to help me? Officer, I'm not even the police. It's just a number you called to get off the tracks, but back to FR, as I was saying, the problem is that they have a limited view of what's really happening on the tracks and not all problems are as easy to solve as take away this woman's driver's license forever, as we learned in East Palestine, some trains carry hazardous materials and the truth is that neither the F nor anyone else knows they are there, which is crazy, it's crazy that the FAA knows the exact location of 5,000 planes in the sky, but the F I can't tell you where most of the trains are or what they contain, in fact, in the New York area a while ago people were quite alarmed when they found out that was transporting volatile crude oil along the Hudson River.

This is the biggest threat to the Hudson I have experienced in my entire career these trains that run almost 50 miles right next to the river transporting highly explosive crude oil in cars that were not designed for this, a total impact 120 cars on some of these trains 30,000 gallons of fuel per car very volatile fuel when it comes down to it, each one of these train cars is like a rolling bomb, that's true and that's not unique to the Hudson Rail Line. Railroad workers regularly refer to trains carrying fuel cargo as bomb trains that This terrifying train bomb doesn't sound like something that should ever be allowed on a railroad, it sounds like the title of a Jason Stan movie that's 27% Rotten Tomatoes, but a rolling bomb is a pretty accurate description, just 22 train cars carrying liquefied natural gas.

The gas contains the explosion energy equivalent to the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima and there have been cases where train cars full of crude oil exploded in populated areas of Canada in 2011 13 there was an explosion in the Lac Megantic area that killed 47 people and left the city looking like this, which may not seem so alarming and you see what that exact place looked like before the explosion, it's hard to say but if you look very closely you will notice that part of that city no longer exists and the notion that profits can be prioritized over safety is in line with the broader trend that is shaping the freight rail industry because, like many large companies, these giant rail companies have felt pressure increasing to reduce margins to please investors and that brings us to the key trend in freight rail.

For the past several decades, the Precision Scheduled Railroad or PSR is the brainchild of this man, Hunter Harrison, seen here in the middle of a colonoscopy until his death six years ago. Harrison worked as CEO at four major railroads and his PSR philosophy has now taken over the entire industry and is about the aggressive pursuit of efficiency. To that end, railroads have closed facilities, retired locomotives and cars, and cut workers to reduce costs and all that is the kind of thing that makes Wall Street idiots extremely happy, in fact, here is one of them, now Hunter Harrison, the new darling.

Wall Street's Harrison will implement a strategy known as precision scheduled railroads. He has already changed routes and schedules and the way the company classifies long trains. In fact, he traces them in his own living room. I'm not kidding, this guy is the real deal. It's cool Train Whisperer, you know a person is pretty awesome if he gets an echoing sound effect. The endorsement loaded on a show esteemed as big-money word vomit with Captain Money Clown, but it's true, Hunter Harrison was the kind of guy who plotted train routes on At Home, he was also the kind of guy who was looking for even the smallest ways to cut costs, from breaking up unused track to eliminating overnight stays from a train.

Crews, he even flew a corporate jet with a tail number that read o59 his aspirational operating index. He said something that made him so happy that he smiled like that, but that efficiency for business has come at a tremendous cost for everyone else and let's start with one of the things that may be less obvious because a key component of precision scheduled rail transportation is operate less, but much longer trains and I mean much longer, some trains now stretch almost three miles long and those longer trains are not only dangerous when they are moving, they can also be dangerous when they are not trains, frequently They need to stop to allow other trains to pass or work on mechanical problems and tracks were built to accommodate this with sidings along the main line where trains can stop.

The problem is that these sidings were built when trains were much shorter and today, when they are several miles long, they can end up stretching. back onto the main runway and possibly across roads that block traffic and that is one of the reasons this can happen in some East End neighborhoods. This has become a very unpleasant soundtrack. The bells begin. Traffic stops. This driver sleeps. This guy gets on this one too. Other. Under all this without thinking about the life-threatening consequences, the wait becomes too long, so how often does this happen? Lorenzo, um, almost every day, that's true, in certain cities the trains can block traffic for hours and it's not like they can arrive quickly. out of the way turning around the trains are like Liam Payne they actually only work in One Direction last year alone there were over 30 thousand reports oftrain crossings across the country with almost a thousand blocks for more than a day and that can mean people end up making risky decisions to go to work or even school it's the kind of moment that takes your breath away a girl in a coat bright red tiny arms and legs moving beneath a train car that could move at any moment is so quiet as he casually dusts himself off, picks up his backpack in a dropped water bottle, and continues on.

It's hard to watch, but I guess it's nice for the younger generation to have an immediate counter whenever their older relatives complain about how they used to do it. walking to school in the snow oh, was it cold grandpa, was it cold? I guess I wasn't really thinking about the weather when I was crawling under a train that could crush my tiny arms and legs to get to Home Room on time and while Fortunately, that girl was okay. Others have been non-pedestrians who attempted to cross trains, disfigured, dismembered and killed after the train suddenly began moving.

Additionally, train crossings can also seriously delay emergency services, such as fire trucks or ambulances, like this Oklahoma man. You know very well that I think it will take a major tragedy for the railroad company to wake up and decide that they are going to do something that happened about 6 and a half years ago, Chad Bird was complaining about these tracks near his house and at the time that They spend sitting at the only intersection to get to their house, I think the biggest concern is if someone gets hurt trying to get an ambulance to that side, until early September 2020, Chad.premonitions came true his father Larry Jean bird dying of a heart attack in the emergency vehicles were trapped behind a train on those same tracks when the emergency crews arrived the police asked the driver if he could move he said no, the lawsuit and added that quote he closed the window locomotive and I didn't answer any more questions, that's horrible and while it's not the most important thing, are we all allowed to close the windows and not talk to the police or is it just for train drivers because if so I'll buy one from Those Stupid Tomorrow Hats, but I wouldn't call his prediction a premonition either, since it was an easily foreseeable consequence of bad policy and that is not unique.

There have been multiple similar stories of people dying and houses burning after emergency vehicles were delayed at crossings, but longer stopped trains are just the beginning of the problems with PSR. There was also the question of what the relentless drive to save does to workers, even as the trains got longer. Staffing was reduced to ridiculously low levels. The union leader explains to an astonished news anchor just after East Palestine how low these levels had become. Look, if you add more and more cars to these trains, you're introducing more and more points of potential failure, and that's why it's really alarming that the rail industry really wants to reduce the number of people operating a train from two, like It is the current standard, at one.

Sorry, wait, are you saying that as of now there is a train with 150 cars carrying hazardous material? Vinyl chloride, whatever, as a standard only has two people operating it, only two for the entire train, yes, that's right, one driver, one engineer and they want to reduce it to one, yes, right, one person, which It's absurd, trains need an engineer to drive the train. and a host for the rest is not one of those jobs where two people do it, although it clearly only requires one, like anchoring the news or renovating a house or hosting the 2011 Oscars, and the people who work in these trains will do it.

Tell him that every part of his job is tiring now, for example, when there are mechanical or other problems that cause a train to stop, the driver may have to walk from the main engine to the problem area and back, which It could mean walking four miles to the Back and forth on a 2m long train, workers are so stretched that they now work ridiculous hours and are required to be on call, forcing them to choose between work and their jobs. families and even doctor's appointments until recently, when workers wanted to take sick days at BNSF, the largest freight railroad in the U.S., they had to schedule them a month in advance and only for Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday, and I don't know how BNSF thinks illnesses work, but the flu doesn't have a Microsoft Outlook calendar where you can check your schedule and book your infection at a time that works for both of you, and even though BNSF changed that policy this fall, it still is in force on other major railways, a former head of the Union sums up the situation this way, as you say. go to work, you're sick and tired or you'll be fired, that's really what this has come to seem like, it's never a good sign when conditions are so bleak, you came up with a catchy little rhyme and no one should be fired. for being sick as far as punishments go, for not being able to work a day, is right up there with being stuck in the tunnel of constant punishment and having sick and tired workers is bad across the board, but it gets a lot worse when you realize some of those workers are the ones who inspect the trains to keep them safe and the time allotted for that keeps shrinking.

A former railroader says Norfol Southern inspectors used to have 5 to 8 minutes to check a train car's wheels for problems like leaking bearings or damaged components, now it's often between 30 seconds to a minute and, Worse yet, employees feel they cannot speak out as a result of a pattern of retaliation against workers who report safety violations or injuries. One whistleblower even sued his company and had pretty compelling evidence on his side. Don Sanders, a former BNSF track inspector in Minnesota, secretly recorded calls with his supervisor in 2015. In this recording obtained by five investigators, you'll hear what happened when the boss discovered Sanders called the Federal Railroad Administration. why should we call? about anything, unless he's absolutely blatantly telling you to break the rules or not do something, it's against company rules and not cool.

I call him and ask him a question. Keith. I don't understand. I don't want you to be. Doing that, yes, is automatically suspicious if you work at a restaurant and your boss tells you that under no circumstances should you call the health inspector. At best, they're taking him for a rat, but that's the best case where the inspector was later fired, where JY later agreed that it was retaliation for reporting too many defects in the tracks and another railroad worker sums it all up like this: The railroad probably 100 years ago came up with safety first, when the precision scheduled railroad came out, they gave us a list of priorities we had to work on.

Hunter Harrison often went through a numbered list of his guiding principles that began with service, then cost control, then asset utilization, and then, and only then, was safety literally fourth. the list and once you get past the three items on a priority list, anything after that is not a priority by definition, it's like ranking your favorite Beatles, there are three you care about and an afterthought that narrates sadistic children's shows about battered trains and at the same time Listening when Harrison was going through his list and finally got two safeties, he ended up making a pretty surprising confession.

The fourth part of this is what we sometimes don't pay enough attention to: just don't hurt anyone while you're at it. By doing this we can now be very sophisticated and we can talk about risk management and loss control, programs and processes, etc. I have blood all over my hands from injuries in this industry that should have been preventable. say after 10 seasons of showing you that the executives deny their negligence, which is almost refreshing, it's the kind of honesty you normally only get from a guy like that after being visited by the ghosts of Christmas and look, the railroad companies They will tell you that safety has always been important. has been important to them and they will point out that derailments have decreased by 44% since 2000, which is true, although I will point out that part of that is because we have run many fewer trains since then and also the derailment rate of major railways. have increased again in recent years.

One railroad veteran describes a major accident as just a matter of time, fearing that a freight train that hasn't been inspected in 990,000 miles will go off the track and explode or leak poison. Without gas, it might take something like this and a lot of deaths and then suddenly everyone will worry. You've already heard that exact sentiment several times in this article and you're probably right and look, the solution here isn't spinning. away from rail again, trains are good because on the one hand they are still safer than road transport and on the other hand, as we have already established, chuga chuga choo choo ding ding ding, trains are fun, but that's not It means they shouldn't be safer and all that.

What is required is some common sense measures that regulate the length of train cars, allow more time for train inspections, do not allow this woman to get properly close to train cars or children. Staff trains with appropriately sized crews and carefully limit the quantities and roots of hazardous materials being transported now to ensure that happens, we need to empower the F to monitor trains and cargo in real time and, while doing so We do, we have the ability to limit the amount of time trains can block intersections, and finally, and crucially, workers need a way to confidentially report safety. problems to regulators without fear of retaliation until we fix all this, we may really need to fundamentally change our children's programming to show the world of trains as they currently are.

Once upon a time on the island of Sodor there was a train called Henry Henry. It was a freight train and it was hauling all kinds of important materials, but one day Tom Hat had an idea and suddenly Henry got longer and longer. Henry got so long while he was resting that he started getting in the way of people and the drivers got very angry. With him I'm late for work, what's the delay? the train said the conductor a little old lady yelled at Henry for a girl to crawl under Henry on his way to school that tickles him said Henry I hate you the train said the girl a fire truck begged him to move I can't move, Henry said, I don't have room, so they both just sat there and watched the Children's Hospital burn, but Henry was told that it was much more efficient now, which is another way of saying profitable and 9.

For a long time It carried all kinds of things that people needed, like medical bandages, corn, vinyl chloride, fireworks, a mysterious red substance, question mark, question mark, hand grenades, question mark plugged into portable heaters and all sorts about zoo animals, what liquefied natural gas is and why I'm pulling 22 cars. Full of it, Henry asked, "You don't mind," he said, "Stopam, I'm all this route home, that's kind of strange and I don't really know how to respond," Henry said, just mind your business like a good machine rolling death Sir Topham Hat said: Sorry, I'm the one who asked Henry, then one day a wheel on one of Henry's tank cars started to overheat.

His engineer hadn't had a chance to inspect it in months. Henry was worried, it seems my Caboose is loose. Can. Don't drive with a caboose loose Henry said to the driver but it was too late oh Henry said Henry the freight engine became Henry the bomb train oh well I thought Henry, it could be worse at least my tankers didn't explode in the meantime On the other side of the island, my God, Thomas said, the explosion destroyed a significant part of the island of Sodor. Henry was so sad that Sir Topham had blood on his hands, but he didn't care, it wasn't his blood and he could just wipe it off.

The new money about Henry was taken out of service and put in a tunnel, but since trains can't die, he had to suffer forever and ever, but I think he deserved his punishment, did he? No? That's our program. Thank you very much for watching see you next

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