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A southeastern North Dakota town narrowly escaped tragedy when a train carrying crude oil derailed and exploded nearby, the mayor said Tuesday, calling for changes in how the fuel is transported across the U.S. No one was hurt in Monday’s derailment of the mile-long train that sent a great fireball and plumes of black smoke skyward about a mile from the small town of Casselton. The fire had been so intense as darkness fell that investigators couldn’t get close enough to count the number of burning cars. The National Transportation Safety Board was preparing to investigate. .Most residents heeded a...

CASSELTON, N.D. — A mile-long train carrying crude oil derailed just a mile before it would have cut through the heart of a small North Dakota town, shaking residents with a series of explosions that sent flame and black smoke skyward. No one was hurt, but officials were evacuating as many as 300 people as a precaution. Casselton Train Derailment

Train 42, 'The Pelican', headed by N&W 4-8-4 Class J 603 arrives at Rural Retreat, VA eastbound from New Orleans to Washington shortly before 10pm Dec. 27th, 1957, and thunders off into the night. The Norfolk & Western Railway's own Class J was perhaps the finest of all express steam engines, and 603 is heard here in its last days of main line service with a consist of 17 cars. The photograph is of Train 17 'The Birmingham Special' westbound arriving later that same night at 11:37pm, being waved through by Agent J.L. Akers. The photograph and sound recording were...

Ignore a spate of accidents, tighter regulations and competitive elements, the use of rail to move crude is here for the long term, speakers told the RailTrends 2013 conference in New York late in November. They offered their bullish outlook against a backdrop of increasing rail shipments in the current quarter after a flattening off in the previous three months as several railroads and refiners noted in the quarterly reports that there has been a rebound in crude pricing that underpins the crude-by-rail, or CBR, sector. Refiners said a third-quarter change in dynamic made the option more economic for some...

A Union Pacific train carrying 70 tanker cars of crude oil from Colorado rolled into the Port of Beaumont’s Orange County Terminal last week — the first to arrive at a new facility built for such shipments. Called a unit train because it carried a single cargo to one destination, it brought 43,000 barrels of oil from the Niobrara Shale in Colorado to the Jefferson Transload Railport for use by an area refinery.

The percentage of North Dakota oil shipped by rail will likely jump significantly in the next year as producers increasingly turn to trains to reach U.S. refineries where premium prices are fetched, the state’s top oil regulator told lawmakers Thursday. Lynn Helms, director of the Department of Mineral Resources, told the Legislature’s Government Finance Committee that he expects as much as 90 percent of the state’s crude will move by rail in 2014, up from about 60 percent at present. North Dakota, the nation’s No. 2 oil producer behind Texas, is on pace to surpass 1 million barrels daily early...

MANHATTAN — Investigators believe the motorman at the controls in the deadly Metro-North Railroad derailment in the Bronx Sunday dozed off for a few fateful moments and woke up too late to stop the speeding train from hurtling off the tracks, DNAinfo New York has learned. Veteran engineer William Rockefeller all but admitted he was falling asleep as the train came roaring to a curved section of track north of Spuyten Duyvil in statements made shortly after four people were killed and dozens were injured in the wreck, sources said. He apparently woke up just as the train, traveling at...

YONKERS, N.Y. (AP) — A commuter train that derailed over the weekend, killing four passengers, was hurtling at 82 mph as it entered a 30 mph curve, a federal investigator said Monday. But whether the wreck was the result of human error or brake trouble was still unclear, he said. Asked why the train was going so fast, National Transportation Safety Board member Earl Weener said: "That's the question we need to answer." Weener said the information on the locomotive's speed was preliminary and extracted from the Metro-North train's two data recorders, taken from the wreckage after the Sunday morning...

Four people were killed and 63 injured when a Metro-North commuter train derailed Sunday morning in the Bronx, officials said. All of the train’s seven cars came off the curved track about 100 feet north of the Spuyten Duyvil station around 7:20 a.m., MTA officials said. One car came to rest feet from the water.

Fairfax County residents have watched cranes and bulldozers rip up roads and disrupt commutes for the dramatic aerial structures that will carry Metro’s newest rail line through Tysons Corner and into Reston. Now that the Silver Line is about to open, many potential riders have one simple question: Where do we park? The answer: You probably don’t. Fairfax officials did not include parking garages at the four Silver Line stations in Tysons. That decision has been cheered by “smart growth” advocates, but residents are concerned that their streets will become de facto Metro parking lots. And some potential Silver Line...

Pipeline transport of oil is so much safer than other modes that resistance to it is raising risks, concludes a study published by the Fraser Institute, Calgary. The risk of a spill in road transport is almost 20 incidents per billion ton-miles, according to US data cited in the study by Diana Furchtgott-Roth, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and Kenneth P. Green, senior director, natural resource policy studies at the Fraser Institute. For rail, the risk is slightly more than two incidents per billion ton-miles. For pipelines, the risk is less than 0.6 incident per billion ton-miles. Citing US...

When it comes to transporting oil, pipelines are the safest option, trumping trains and trucks, according to a new report from Canada’s Fraser Institute. The study is just the latest to make the safety case for greater reliance on pipelines, coming while the Obama administration weighs whether Keystone XL is in the national interest and even as Tesoro starts cleaning up a seven-acre oil spill in a North Dakota wheat field. U.S. data on incidents from 2005 to 2009 “show that road and rail have higher rates of serious incidents, injuries and fatalities than pipelines, even though more road and...

There is no doubt about it. The Obama-era represents what Rep. Alan Grayson calls “stealth Socialism” – the government takeover of the bond market (The Fed), the healthcare system (Obamacare) and forced integration of suburbs (HUD Secretary Donovan’s plan). In that respect, the US is becoming more and more like China where their central planners have been busy building massive cities where no one can afford to live. China even has a replica of London (Thames Town) thamestown and Paris. chparis And an abandoned, fake DisneyWorld! wonderland-buildings-arches-turrets_46178_600x450 Not to mention Manhattan. fakenan Of course, China’s population is growing and eventually...

AFP - Al-Qaeda is plotting attacks on Europe's high-speed rail network, German mass circulation daily Bild reported on Monday, citing intelligence sources. The extremist group could plant explosives on trains and tunnels or sabotage tracks and electrical cabling, said Bild, Europe's most widely read daily. Bild said the information came from the National Security Agency (NSA) in the United States, which had listened in to a conference call involving top Al-Qaeda operatives. The attacks on Europe's rail network was a "central topic" of this call, Bild said.

there's no reason to believe the Honolulu's rail project will do anything to improve traffic congestion. In fact, it's likely to divert resources from more-affordable solutions. "The one thing about these projects [is that] they are very inviting politically," says former Hawaii Gov. Ben Cayetano. Along with Cliff Slater of Honolulutraffic.com and University of Hawaii's Roth, Cayetano has filed a federal lawsuit against the rail project that's held up construction. They claim the city misled the public about the total cost of the project and didn't deliver fully on a required review of alternative solutions to a rail line. Panos...

SINGAPORE, Aug 3 — Malaysia has finalised its full report on the proposed high-speed rail link between Kuala Lumpur and Singapore. Local television Channel NewsAsia reported Mohd Nur Ismal Mohamed Kamal, chief executive officer of the Malaysia Land Public Transport Commission, as saying that the two sides will meet after the Aidil Fitri celebrations at the end of the month. He said: “The base line alignment and all that is done. But of course, minor changes can still happen. We are just starting the process of engagement and discussion with the Singapore side, with the joint ministerial committee meeting up...

Existing conventional modes of transportation of people consists of four unique types: rail, road, water, and air. These modes of transport tend to be either relatively slow (i.e., road and water), expensive (i.e., air), or a combination of relatively slow and expensive (i.e., rail). Hyperloop is a new mode of transport that seeks to change this paradigm by being both fast and inexpensive for people and goods. Hyperloop is also unique in that it is an open design concept, similar to Linux. Feedback is desired from the community that can help advance the Hyperloop design and bring it from concept...

A rail company whose runaway oil train caused a fire and explosion that killed 47 people in a small town in Canada filed for bankruptcy protection in the U.S. and Canada on Wednesday, and an attorney said he expects company executives to explore putting it up for sale within weeks. In its filings, Montreal, Maine & Atlantic Railway Ltd. and its Canadian counterpart, Montreal, Maine & Atlantic Canada Co., cited debts to more than 200 creditors following the disaster in Lac-Megantic, Quebec. Attorney Peter Flowers, who represents 30 of the victims’ families, accused company Chairman Ed Burkhardt of trying to...

Rail traffic may begin running through Lac-Mégantic again this week, but the Montreal, Maine and Atlantic railway has decided it will stop hauling oil after one of its trains derailed and exploded here last month. “It’s proven to be more trouble than it’s worth, and I guess that’s putting this mildly,” company chairman Ed Burkhardt said on Monday, a month after a runaway MMA train exploded downtown, killing 47 people and levelling much of the town. “We don’t plan to continue with oil transportation. That traffic is going to go other ways, not over our lines,” he said. The train...

A train carrying highly flammable and corrosive materials derailed in north Louisiana on Sunday. Over 100 homes have been evacuated as a precaution, Gov. Bobby Jindal said, adding there were no fatalities or injuries and air monitors have not picked up anything to cause concern. According to a press release from Jindal's office, three cars were leaking as of late Sunday. One is leaking lubricant oil while a second is leaking Dodecanol, a tasteless, colorless alcohol that can cause mild skin irritation. The third, however, is carrying a highly corrosive substance called caustic soda, or lye. Two other cars containing...