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AUBURN, Wash. — A 42-year-old man died Saturday after he was hit by an Amtrak train in Auburn, fire officials said. The incident occurred at about 3:30 p.m. near C Street Southwest and Eighth Street. According to the Auburn Fire Department, the man’s girlfriend was taking pictures of him sitting on the rails when an Amtrak Cascades Train struck the man, who was from Las Vegas.

The chief executive of TransCanada said Wednesday if the Obama administration doesn’t approve the controversial Keystone XL pipeline his company will look to the more dangerous alternative of building build rail terminals in Alberta and Oklahoma. President Barack Obama is expected to decide early this year on Keystone XL, which is under review at the State Department. The long-delayed pipeline would carry oil from Canada to the Gulf Coast. TransCanada CEO Russ Girling said pipelines are “by far a safer alternative” to oil trains but said if customers want him to build rail terminals he will. He said he’s in...

Regulations that could force oil companies to use stronger rail cars to move crude likely will be ready in 2015, according to a schedule released Tuesday by the U.S. Department of Transportation. Oil companies have increasingly used rail cars to move crude, but recent disasters, including a derailment and massive explosions in North Dakota last month, have drawn attention to the cars’ vulnerabilities. New regulations that could force older tank cars to be upgraded or phased out are under development, but will not be proposed until Nov. 12 and will be subject to a public comment period until Jan. 12,...

The railway industry wants to “aggressively phase out” older model tank cars that have been implicated in several recent accidents, the head of CN Rail’s safety division told an industry forum Monday. But the consensus at the day-long workshop was that there’s no quick fix for a decades-old problem that has almost 80,000 sub-standard DOT-111 tank cars carrying flammable liquids on North American tracks. And whatever the solution, the cost eventually will be borne by consumers. Sam Berrada, director general of safety and occupational health services for CN, told an overflow crowd of industry types, regulators, lobbyists and local first...

California’s ludicrously ambitious plan to build a high-speed railway connecting Los Angeles and San Francisco has been besieged with all kinds of problems from almost the moment of its official conception, but let that not restrain California Democrats from doubling down on what they seem to view as their iliadic quest to make high-speed rail happen. Back in August, a judge declared that the project had already violated the 2008 ballot initiative that first authorized the $10 billion in bonds for the 500-mile train, because the state didn't actually having funding sources on the books for the $31 billion required...

Sen. John Hoeven (R-N.D.) said he thinks President Obama will approve the proposed Keystone XL pipeline. In the wake of multiple crude-by-rail train accidents in North Dakota -- leaving railcars ablaze and nearby residents at risk --Hoeven said on "Platts Energy Week" that the U.S. needs more pipelines. The U.S. needs pipelines "not only to improve conditions in terms of rail, but trucks," Hoeven said on Sunday. "With the Keystone pipeline, we'd take 500 trucks a day off our roads in western North Dakota." "So clearly pipelines are a part of the solution. But also we have to do everything...

Officials in Canada said a derailed freight train carrying crude oil and propane continued to burn Wednesday morning, while they prepared to launch aerial surveillance and more than 100 residents remained evacuated from their homes. There were no deaths or injuries. “The biggest concern is the propane cars,” the fire chief of the nearby community of Plaster Rock, Tim Corbin, said Wednesday morning, according to CBC News. “That’s our biggest concern because if they happen to explode, we’re looking at major damage.” The derailment late Tuesday in a sparsely populated region of New Brunswick again raised concerns about the increasing...

Energy Policy: An oil-laden train collides with another and bursts into flames in a small American town, proving why pipelines are safer and why environmentalist opposition to a pipeline from Canada is misguided. Casselton, N.D., had a near brush with tragedy after a train of tank cars carrying crude oil derailed, resulting in fiery explosions and a call from the town's mayor for a re-examination of how such fuel is transported across the United States. The railroad runs right through the middle of Casselton, a town of 2,400 people about 25 miles west of Fargo, and Mayor Ed McConnell said...

As America's energy story continues to develop, we are looking at three unmistakable opportunities for the midstream industry heading in to 2014. Today we examine the oil by rail, mergers and acquisitions, and export trends through the lens of four of the largest U.S. midstream companies: Energy Transfer Partners (NYSE: ETP ) , Enterprise Products Partners (NYSE: EPD ) , Kinder Morgan Energy Partners (NYSE: KMP ) , and Plains All American Pipeline (NYSE: PAA ) . 1. Oil by rail Shipping oil by rail was a major trend in 2013, and there's no reason to think that will change...

A third major explosion involving Bakken shale oil, in North Dakota on Monday night, is eliciting calls for improved safety regulations in both Canada and the U.S. The safe transport of oil by rail has been highlighted as important to B.C. by municipalities and environmentalists because an increasing amount of oil is being delivered by rail here already. There is also the prospect of a major increase in oil-by-rail shipments through B.C. if controversial pipeline projects proposed to carry bitumen to the west coast don’t materialize or are delayed. In North Dakota, most of the 2,300 residents of the town...

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...