I've been tracking train incidents in my area. The latest one on Sunday by Topeka was pretty big. This link also has other relevant information:
http://www.ble.org/pr/news/headline.asp?id=9939 This article from the Kansas City Business Journal on February 20th laments about three derailments in two weeks:
http://kansascity.bizjournals.com/kansascity/stories/2004/02/16/daily44.html?t=printable February 20, 2004
BNSF tracks have third derailment in two weeks
A third derailment in two weeks dumped train cars bearing military vehicles from Burlington Northern Santa Fe's tracks on Friday, but a spokesman for the track owner said there's no trend evident in the accidents' circumstances.
The cause of Friday's Union Pacific crash near Southwest Boulevard just inside Kansas remained unknown by afternoon, BNSF spokesman Steve Forsberg said.
"It had just come onto our track," he said
Union Pacific has "trackage rights" on the double-tracked BNSF route between Downtown and Paola, Kan.
Forsberg said that one of the two tracks would be repaired and reopened by early evening Friday but that it would take longer to move the eight derailed cars from the other track and fix the rails.
On Feb. 9, about 10 cars of an Amtrak train derailed on another BNSF track in Wyandotte County, where the investigation has focused on a connection between two tracks after analysts ruled out malfunction of the Amtrak equipment as a potential cause, Forsberg said.
A "track-side monitor" registered a fault in one of the 10 coal cars that derailed Feb. 16 in Lenexa, Forsberg said. The alert came too late to stop the train, however.
Forsberg said BNSF's derailment rate is about 2.9 per million miles of train traffic a year, compared with an industry average in 2002 of 3.75, according to the Federal Railroad Administration. In the 1980s, the rate was about 14, he said.
"We're a very, very anal-retentive industry when it comes to safety," he said.
This link has pictures of the army train that derailed on February 21st and dumped tanks and fuel:
http://www.news-leader.com/_saturday/0221-Traincarry-19815.html And finally, from the Federal Railroad Administration, here is a link to Total Accident/Incidents. I found quite a bit of info navigating around this link, but the stats are pretty old.
http://safetydata.fra.dot.gov/OfficeofSafety/Default.asp?page=stats.asp Good night, stay safe.
Wow, that's a lot of information. Good job on keeping track of the trains off the track. :-)
I'm bookmarking to read tomorrow, calling it a night.
Thanks for all your hard work and great information. Hopefully we can keep one step ahead of them!!
One side note, I just went for a walk with the dog. It was so quiet outside, no cars,no people (old folks go to bed early) the sky was clear and beautiful, there was a slight wind blowing....it was very eerie and peaceful at the same time. I thought no one can take this beautiful country away from us no matter what they do. We are ready to fight them even if it's only here on this thread by gathering as much information as we can and if by the grace of God we latch onto one small piece of the puzzle we have done as much as we can. At least we did something!!