Kathy Fox still remembers the looks on the faces of the grieving family members on the morning in August 2014, as she tried to explain how the Lac-Mégantic rail disaster had happened.
“It was a hard day."
A slew of investigations, court cases, reports and regulatory changes followed over the succeeding decade. Collisions and derailments on main tracks — which the TSB notes can have the “highest severity” of all rail accidents — hit three accidents per million train-miles last year.Meanwhile, the volume of dangerous goods on the tracks rose 70 per cent between 2011 and 2019, according to the government’s rail traffic database.
“If you give the railways too free a hand, sometimes they make really poor decisions, and they're not penalized for it,” said Ian Naish, a rail safety consultant who served as the TSB's director of rail and pipeline investigations between 1998 and 2009. Brazeau said the accident rate for both freight rail and dangerous goods has improved markedly over the past decade.
The slowest pace of change has arguably been around rail signalling — the trackside lights that authorize various train movements.
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