Free Republic

The environmental group Earthjustice, funded by George Soros and joined by the Sierra Club and ForestEthics, is suing the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) in order to prevent crude oil from North Dakota’s Bakken formation to be moved to California. The suit is reportedly in reaction the Kern County Board of Supervisors’ approval last Tuesday of Alon USA Energy's plan to expand the rail terminal at its Bakersfield, CA refinery. The expansion of the terminal would create the state’s largest crude-by-rail facility and allow the terminal to import five times as much crude oil by train as it already does, Earthjustice is also claiming...

Senators and shippers complained Wednesday that widespread delays in freight rail shipments are hurting a wide array of industries and driving some companies out of business, and they expressed doubt that the railroad companies are doing all they can to fix the problem. The delays, which escalated late last year and continued through the spring and summer, appear to be the result of too few rail cars and too much demand from shippers, officials representing the agriculture, auto and chemical industries told a hearing of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee. Lawmakers displayed a photo of a giant mound...

Rail shipments of crude oil rose to 119,634 carloads in the most recent fiscal quarter, an increase of more than 10 percent over the 106,605 shipments in the comparable period last year, according to figures released Thursday by the American Association of Railroads. The association, an industry trade group, called it the busiest quarter ever for crude oil shipments by rail. In the single month of August, shipments rose 25 percent compared to the previous August. Shipments of other commodities showed more modest gains. As oil production has soared past pipeline capacity, trains have become a favored alternative for the...

Five people have been arrested after demonstrated blocked railroad tracks at a Burlington Northern Santa Fe yard in Everett. Railroad spokesman Gus Melonas says two women and three men were taken to the Snohomish County Jail after refusing to leave a protest of train shipments of oil and coal and proposed export terminals in the Northwest... The group Rising Tide Seattle erected a tripod of poles over the tracks with a woman perched on top....

The amount of crude oil and refined petroleum products moved by U.S. railroads increased 9% during the first seven months of this year compared with the same period in 2013. In July, monthly average carloadings of oil and petroleum products were near 16,000 carloads per week, according to the Association of American Railroads (AAR). The increase in oil volumes transported by rail reflects rising U.S. crude oil production, which reached an estimated 8.5 million barrels per day in June for the first time since July 1986. AAR estimates that more than half of the nearly 460,000 carloads tracked in its...

If you’re stuck at a railroad crossing or trapped on a delayed Amtrak train, you might blame it on the US oil boom. US oil production is the highest in decades, and more and more crude is traveling by train. That is slowing shipments of grains, gravel, and even coal, as commodities and a resurgent oil industry compete for a finite amount of US rail. More oil pipelines could help ease the freight bottleneck, but those take time to build and have become controversial topics in the debate over the future of US energy. In the meantime, firms are taking...

FARGO, N.D. — The furious pace of energy exploration in North Dakota is creating a crisis for farmers whose grain shipments have been held up by a vast new movement of oil by rail, leading to millions of dollars in agricultural losses and slower production for breakfast cereal giants like General Mills. The backlog is only going to get worse, farmers said, as they prepared this week for what is expected to be a record crop of wheat and soybeans. “If we can’t get this stuff out soon, a lot of it is simply going to go on the ground...

The weak safety culture of a now-defunct railway company and poor government oversight were among the many factors that led to an oil train explosion that killed 47 people in Quebec last year, Canada’s Transportation Safety Board said in a new report released Tuesday. TSB chair Wendy Tadros said 18 factors played a role, including a rail company that cut corners and a Canadian regulator that didn’t do proper safety audits. The safety board issued its report 13 months after a runaway train carrying 72 carloads of volatile oil from North Dakota derailed, hurtled down an incline and slammed into...

Scores of travelers were stranded after the Acela Express 2253 took off from one platform about 3 p.m. — while they were waiting at another and unaware the train was leaving them behind. An Amtrak train bound for Washington pulled away from Penn Station on Saturday without some pretty important cargo: its passengers. ... They literally sent us to the wrong platform, and the conductor took off without any passengers,” said Damien Miano, 60, of Chelsea. “The right hand didn’t know what the left hand was doing. It was just so bizarre.” Miano said he and the other abandoned travelers...

SUPERIOR, MT -- A train derailed near Superior Thursday, sending Boeing aircraft fuselages into a river. Nineteen cars on the westbound train derailed. Three of the cars contained aircraft parts and ended up in the Clark Fork River. Boeing said the train was headed from Spirit Aerosystems in Wichita to the Boeing final assembly plant in Renton. No one was hurt. The cause is under investigation. Boeing said the Burlington Northern Santa Fe train was carrying six 737 fuselages, fuselage panels and a lower lobe for the 777, and a leading edge flight surface for the 747. Boeing says it...

Energy: As a big Dem donor talks of pipeline terrorism, new federal reports warn that killing Keystone XL will overburden rail transport of oil and result in more frequent and deadlier environmental disasters. Environmentalists who claim that the Keystone pipeline from Canada represents an unprecedented environmental threat ignore that the pipeline would pose no greater danger than the more than 50,000 existing miles of safely operating pipeline already crisscrossing the U.S. They also ignore the very real and growing environmental danger in the only viable alternate for transporting oil — by rail. Keystone would not only carry oil from Canada...

As onshore crude oil production in the United States increased over the past few years, producers have increasingly moved crude oil out of production areas by rail. Producers in North Dakota, in particular, have used rail to ship crude oil to refineries and midstream companies at newly built unloading terminals on the East Coast and West Coast. The number of rail carloads of crude oil began rising in 2012, as production in the Bakken Shale and other shale plays grew. According to the North Dakota Pipeline Authority, Bakken rail outflow capacity totaled 965,000 barrels per day (bbl/d) at the end...

<p>The Vancouver City Council has voted to oppose what would be the Pacific Northwest’s largest crude oil train terminal.</p> <p>The vote came well after midnight on Tuesday in council chambers packed with hundreds of people, many of them opposed to the project.</p>

Canadian exports of crude oil by rail hit a record high of 160,000 barrels per day in the first quarter of 2014, Canada's National Energy Board says, a more than 50 percent rise from the same period a year earlier. Canada shipped 160,164 bpd out of the country by rail between January and March, a sharp rise from the first quarter of 2013, when it exported 105,632 bpd, the NEB said on Friday. The first-quarter figure was a 7 percent increase from the final quarter of 2013, when 149,479 bpd were exported by rail. The crude-by-rail boom in Canada has...

Lac-Mégantic train disaster leads to charges against Montreal Maine and Atlantic Railway and three employees Nearly one year after a runaway train killed 47 people in the Eastern Townships community of Lac-Mégantic, Que., prosecutors have laid criminal negligence charges against the railway and three employees connected to the disaster, including the train’s lone engineer. On Monday, a spokesman for Quebec’s director of criminal and penal prosecutions said 47 counts of criminal negligence causing death had been filed against engineer Thomas Harding, manager of train operations Jean Demaitre, railway traffic controller Richard Labrie, as well as the Montreal Maine and Atlantic...

Apparently they seek to lower the cost of dominating our markets while keeping a tight leash on a rudderless debtor and efficiently extracting benefits/wealth from Chinese properties (and powerful traitors) in the USA.  Maybe you 2x Obama voters didn't expect hopenchange to include being sold into economic slavery, yet here we are... thanks, idiots! A Bering Strait tunnel and/or bridge has been actually been proposed at various times, going back to 1892, and most often by the Russians. Moscow says they are still currently planning a bridge project for $65B, yet experts doubt that their conventional rail approach -if ever actualized- would be able...

AMERICA has by far the largest rail network in the world, with more than twice as much track as China. But it lags far behind other first-world countries in ridership. Instead of passengers, most of America's massive rail network is used to carry freight. Why don't Americans ride trains? ..the Japanese, the Swiss, the French, the Danes, the Russians, the Austrians, the Ukrainians, the Belarussians and the Belgians all accounted for more than 1,000 passenger-kilometres by rail in 2011; Americans accounted for 80. Amtrak carries 31m passengers per year. Mozambique's railways carried 108m passengers in 2011. There are many reasons...

Amtrak train en route from Boston to Washington. ... It was the second accident involving an Amtrak train in Connecticut this week. An Amtrak Acela Express struck and killed a man in Groton on Monday.

Another major derailment of a train carrying oil through a town in the U.S. has caused the evacuation of 300 people, with oil washing into the James River in Virginia, which feeds into the Chesapeake Bay.