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A 120-car Norfolk Southern Corp train carrying heavy Canadian crude oil derailed and spilled in western Pennsylvania on Thursday, adding to a string of recent accidents that have prompted calls for stronger safety standards. There were no reports of injury or fire after 21 tank cars came off the track and crashed into a nearby industrial building at a bend by the Kiskiminetas River in the town of Vandergrift. Nineteen of the derailed cars were carrying oil, four of which spilled between 3,000 and 4,000 gallons of oil, Norfolk Southern said. The leaks have since been plugged. The two other...

Tesoro Corp. said this week that it’s begun replacing its older rail cars used to transport crude oil with those of safer design. The San Antonio-based refiner said its rail-car fleet will consist entirely of the safer cars by mid-year. The change will apply “to the vast majority of crude-oil deliveries into Tesoro’s facilities,” the company said. Tesoro said it is “proactively” making the change, adopting designs for newer rail cars used to transport crude that were a recommended standard starting in October 2011. “Tesoro is committed to the safe and environmentally sound handling of crude oil,” Keith Casey, Tesoro’s...

BNSF plans to invest $5 billion in its railroad this year, including $900 million to expand capacity in the Northern Plains where crude oil shipments are surging. The railroad said Tuesday its 2014 spending plan is roughly $1 billion higher than last year. BNSF says it’s responding to significant volume growth. Some projects should help alleviate congestion near the booming Bakken oil field in North Dakota and Montana...

France's state-owned railway is set to be banned from bidding for a £4 billion contract in the USA because of its role in the World War II Holocaust, it emerged today. SNCF runs some of the fastest and most efficient lines in the world but has a dark history which saw it transport thousands of Jews to their deaths in German concentration camps. Now senators in the US state of Maryland have proposed a bill which would make it illegal for the French to apply for prestige projects.

Government investigators have found crude oil being transported from North Dakota’s Bakken region was misclassified in samples taken from 11 out of 18 truck shipments en route to rail loading stations, federal transportation officials said Tuesday. Hazardous materials shipments are supposed to be classified into one of nine categories depending on the risk involved. If the materials are misclassified, they could wind up being shipped in less protective rail tank cars and emergency personnel might follow the wrong protocols when responding to a spill. The Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration said it has proposed fining three companies involved in...

Replacing the Keystone XL pipeline with oil-laden freight trains from Canada may result in an average of six additional rail-related deaths per year, according to a U.S. State Department report that is adding to pressure for President Barack Obama to approve the line. The long-awaited study, released on Friday, focused on the environmental impact of TransCanada's $5.4 billion pipeline, but also spent several pages analyzing the potential human impact of various ways to transport oil, using historical injury and fatality statistics for railways and oil pipelines. Although it excluded the runaway oil train derailment that killed 47 people in Lac...

Could a $15 billion railroad project reduce the cost of living in Alaska overnight? Matt Vickers, a lead member in the startup group G7G Railway Corp., thinks it can. Vickers’ Vancouver-based group is proposing a 1,600-mile railroad from Fort McMurray, Alberta, into Alaska. About 240 miles of the rail would be laid in the state. The railroad would primarily transport bitumen from Alberta’s tar sands to Delta Junction, where the project’s creators hope to tap into TAPS, the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System. That version of the project would depend on the Alaska Railroad Corporation extending its rail line 80 miles from...

A Canadian National Railway Co train carrying fuel oil and other hazardous materials derailed and was leaking in southeast Mississippi on Friday, forcing the evacuation of nearby residents, officials said. No one was injured in the incident which involved the derailment of 21 railcars, eight of which have spilled their contents, a Canadian National Railway spokesman said. Several of the cars were carrying hazardous materials including fertilizer and methanol, but there was no fire, he said. The accident, the latest in a string of North American train derailments over the past year, occurred in the city limits of New Augusta...

With limited pipeline options to ship oil sands crude out of Canada, Exxon Mobil Corp. plans to move up to 100,000 barrels per day of Canadian oil using a new rail terminal that should be running by 2015, an executive said Thursday. The terminal, to be constructed in Alberta, will cost up to $250 million if it is built to a maximum capacity of 250,000 barrels of oil per day, said David Rosenthal, Exxon Mobil’s vice president of investor relations, during a conference call with analysts. The rail terminal is being developed by Kinder Morgan and Imperial Oil at an...

Tragic teen Kanwel Butt was electrocuted while 'listening' to the railway track to see if his delayed train was coming. The 17-year-old put his ear to the live rail and was killed instantly. An inquest today heard how the teenager had moved to England from Pakistan just months earlier and was making his first solo train journey. In Pakistan people sometimes listen to rails, which are not live, to see if a train is coming.

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...