Rail Safety Megathread. Updated December 23, 2024

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55. Brake Defects Plague Canada's Aging Grain Cars

May 15, 2020 Class I, Freight, Freight Cars, Mechanical, News, Regulatory, Safety

Brake Defects Plague Canada’s Aging Grain Cars

Written by David Thomas, Canadian Contributing Editor

Hard-to-detect braking system defects have rendered Canada’s aging fleet of grain hoppers a safety hazard, says a former director of derailment investigations for the country’s Transportation Safety Board (TSB), the Canadian equivalent of the U.S. NTSB. Ian Naish, who retired from the TSB in 2009, in a CBC interview posted May 15, declared, “The grain car fleet overall is quite defective.”

Naish’s warning followed his former employer’s Rail Safety Advisory Letter dated April 20, 2020, which said that the standard visual inspection of brake pipe connections and piston applications—the so-called “Number 1 Test” performed by car inspectors prior to trains departing originating yards—is unreliable and does not reveal a high percentage of malfunctioning railcar brakes.

The TSB advisory emerged from the agency’s continuing investigation into a Feb. 4 , 2019 runaway and triple-fatality derailment of a Canadian Pacific grain train descending the steep grade connecting the Spiral Tunnels near Field, B.C. The investigation found that the train had passed the Number 1 test at Calgary’s Alyth Yard the day before, indicating that at least 95% of the train’s 112 grain cars had intact rigging and normal piston travel under the application and release of brake pipe air pressure.

As TSB noted, “The actual brake force or its effect is not physically measured.” In other words, the Number 1 brake test verifies connectivity and piston travel, but says nothing about the actual braking power of shoes against wheel treads. The brake may visually appear to be functioning when it is in fact applying little stopping pressure.

The discrepancy between a passing grade on physical inspection and true brake performance was spotlighted back in 2016 in joint research by the TSB, CP and the National Research Council. The tests measured the temperature of each wheel in a train after a long descending grade requiring prolonged brake applications. Warm wheels indicated properly functioning brakes; cold wheels the opposite. There was a wide variation between visual inspection passes and actual brake energy conversion, as measured by trackside sensors in ATBE (Automated Train Brake Effectiveness) testing. CP has been involved in implementation and testing of ATBE since 2011, according to a report from the International Railway Safety Council.

In a comparison of inspection methods comprising 44 grain trains, the automated temperature checks “identified 695 cars with ineffective brakes, while the No. 1 brake test identified 5 cars; a 139:1 ratio.”

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