CN’s seven-car blaze late Saturday, Feb. 14, 2015 in a roadless area of northern Ontario, where 29 cars of a 100-car train derailed, involved CPC-1232 cars, CN confirmed to Railway Age. But a smaller event in the early hours of the same day in southern Alberta was an encouraging real-world trial of the industry's voluntary CPC-1232 tank car design, in production since 2011.
Sometime before dawn, a westbound Canadian Pacific train carrying crude from Western Canada jumped the tracks in the midst of a rocky debris field created in 1903 when Turtle Mountain collapsed, flooding the Crowsnest River valley with a vast flow of limestone boulders and killing 90 people. In Saturday’s incident, 12 CPC-1232 tank cars derailed, two of them toppling into the debris field and coming to rest on their sides (top two photos, by David Thomas).
No crude leaked from the two tank cars, which were jacked upright and emptied of their lading into three rescue tankers dispatched from Lethbridge, along with several hopper loads of ballast to repair the track. On-site supervisors said a broken rail was responsible.
The short distance between the point of failure and the rolled tank cars indicates the train was moving at considerably less than the 40 mph limit through the slide area, protected by law as the last resting place for the 80 persons whose bodies were never recovered.
The CPC-1232 car is designed to contain its lading in relatively slow-speed derailments and rollovers. As the Crowsnest Pass event indicates, they work as designed in low-energy incidents. Carbuilders themselves advise that neither the CPC-1232 nor its yet-to-be-designated official successor could withstand the forces of high-speed derailments or collisions.
The flow of crude-by-rail through Crowsnest Pass has increased markedly under an agreement between CP and Union Pacific to smooth the interchange of unit oil trains at the border between Idaho and British Columbia.
The two Canadian oil train derailments were followed by the Feb. 16 derailment in Mount Carbon, W.Va. (about 30 miles southeast of Charleston) of a CSX train hauling 107 CPC-1232 tank cars of Bakken crude oil bound for Yorktown, Va. At least two tank cars went into the Kanawha River, and at least 9 tank cars ignited, with several exploding, sparking a house fire. Nearby residents were evacuated as state emergency response and environmental officials headed to the scene. It was the second derailment within one year on that line.
West Virginia was under a winter storm warning and getting heavy snowfall, but it’s unclear if the weather had anything to do with the derailment, which occurred about 1:20 p.m. No injuries related to the house fire or tank car fires have been reported.