Derailments

[ccvstmr]

What many corporate boards fail to understand is the risk management perspective. That is...cost avoidance. It's hard to understand the value of cost avoidance, until people are running around trying to repair the damage. The corporate boards have a choice...spend 100's of thousands of dollars up front for some detection/protection hardware...OR...spend millions for wreck repairs and environmental remediation? Boards that don't "get this" would rather spend the millions after the fact...instead of the usually smaller cost up front. Or in other words, they believe they can save money being reacting instead of preventing. In the meantime, they'll hide behind there...watching our for investor dollars. You know what they say...hind sight is always 20/20! Carl B.

[makinsmoke]

What I’ve read here is hot box detectors alarmed three times of increasing bearing temperatures on that truck prior to the derailment.

It would seem the equipment was in in place to detect and prevent this event.

Where did NS fail to provide the necessary equipment due to cost saving measures?

[Charles T. McCullough]

Where I worked, we built high-end military and commercial (Avionic) electronic devices (we generically called them all 'radios', even if they were some other device!) and every few years there would be a change in management (board of directors) where they would balk at the manufacturing process of testing components before installing them on printed circuit boards, then testing the boards before putting them in modules, then testing the modules before putting them in the completed top-level radio, only to test the top-level radio before shipping.
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"Too expensive to do all that low level testing!" and they would decree to eliminate it. Build the devices and test them at the top level... "lots cheaper, don't waste so much time, manpower, equipment and money testing at the low levels!"
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Then they would discover that the cost of throwing away a bad component just in the door was 1/100th the cost of having to repair the printed circuit card, and repairing the card was 1/100th the cost of repairing a module, and repairing the module was 1/100th the cost of repairing the top level unit. And there were always "infant mortality" of components breaking after installation, or manufacturing defects (solder shorts, overheated components, breakage, etc.) such that all levels of testing found problems. But eliminating problems at each step was cheaper than finding them just before shipping (or worse, the customer finding problems!)
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"Gee, all that preliminary testing was lots cheaper than fixing problems just before shipping the final product. And the customer finding them meant no future contracts!"
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We would go back to all that wasted time, manpower, equipment and money testing at each stage of the manufacturing process to improve the corporate bottom line.
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Those of us that were there long-term were voices lost in the wilderness when the next new product came along... until the expenses started rolling in (or OVER the bottom line).

[Greg_Lewis]

What I’ve read here is hot box detectors alarmed three times of increasing bearing temperatures on that truck prior to the derailment.

It would seem the equipment was in in place to detect and prevent this event.

Where did NS fail to provide the necessary equipment due to cost saving measures?

According to a preliminary report by the NTSB, the hot box detectors did not alert the crew until the third detection which was 253 degrees above ambient. The crew then applied the brakes but by the time they stopped it was too late. Here's the article:
https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/25/us/ohio- ... index.html

[NP317]

Interesting discussion.
My last THREE major career jobs were all ones that pursued me!

Maybe I've been lucky.
Happy St. Patty's day (minus 1).
RussN

[Steggy]

What I’ve read here is hot box detectors alarmed three times of increasing bearing temperatures on that truck prior to the derailment.

It would seem the equipment was in in place to detect and prevent this event.

Where did NS fail to provide the necessary equipment due to cost saving measures?

According to a preliminary report by the NTSB, the hot box detectors did not alert the crew until the third detection which was 253 degrees above ambient. The crew then applied the brakes but by the time they stopped it was too late. Here's the article:
https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/25/us/ohio- ... index.html

From the referenced article:

The vibration of a failing bearing, [Constantine] Tarawneh says, often begins intensifying thousands of miles before a catastrophic failure. So his team created sensors that can be placed on board each rail car, near the bearing, to continuously monitor its vibration throughout its travels.

Tarawneh sounds like a typical academic with no apparent concept of scale and cost.

He says, according to the article, that use of vibration sensors on all cars should be federally mandated. Does this guy have any idea how many freight cars are running around North America? Who’s going to pony up the money to retrofit over a million cars? I won’t even mention the new infrastructure that would be needed on tens of thousands of miles of mainline track.

The reality is outright bearing failure is uncommon and this technology would largely do nothing for the railroads that couldn’t be done using existing wayside detection methods.

The reason those first two hot box readings didn’t trigger an alert, the report said, is because Norfolk Southern’s policy is to only stop and inspect a bearing after it has reached 170 degrees above ambient temperature.

A properly-functioning roller bearing should never get that hot relative to ambient. In fact, 100 degrees above ambient would be worrisome to me. These are roller bearings and shouldn’t be exhibiting that much friction. My opinion is NS has the alarm threshold of their hotbox detectors set much too high.

[rrnut-2]

A year ago, I got hired for a full time maintenance job not because of my age but that I passed the drug test, security background check and almost 50 years of experience. I was actually shocked that I got hired even with my age!

[kcameron]

I suspect that one thing confusing a lot of people was that the string of detectors showed a trend. But I don't think detectors do anything more than talk on the radio when they trigger. No over watching system that would have been able to see that a given train, with a given car, on a given axle was changing progressively. Might it be an idea, but that's a lot of central processing and data collection. I'm thinking bandwidth, storage, etc...

But if they are looking at this data now, that says some of it is recorded somewhere. So it could be done. But I'm also guessing that the parameters to watch and tell might be harder than just increasing. Impact of things like a changing ambient (day vs night) a train that stopped vs moving, where is the sun angle, etc... may prove lots of post processing lets you see things very difficult to see in real time.

Anyone know how those things get recorded or transmitted?

[Dick_Morris]

For several years there have been sensors on the valve stems of cars to check the tire pressure and display them on the dash board. Things have changed a lot in how something can be monitored in the last few years.

[Bill Shields]

IIRC the hotbox detectors report temp above ambient.

It all goes into a database in real time.

From a technical standpoint, it is no real trick these days (the data collection).

All pretty routine stuff, similar to many remote manufacturing process monitoring systems.

[Bruce_Mowbray]

"Anyone know how those things get recorded or transmitted"
In my neck of the woods, the detectors, both dragging equipment and hot box units, broadcast on the railroad's radio frequecy used by the train crews and dispatchers. The detector number, location, axle count, and the ending (hopefully fro the train crew) "NO FEFECTS" is broadcast over the radio. The dispatchers on duty listen, and most likely record, all of these detector's reports. Therfore, not only do the train crew, but also the dispatchers are aware of anything overheating or dragging.
BTW, it's how the local railfans know when they can head over to trackside from their cozy homes to their favorite trackside photo spot. The detectors broadcast quite a distance.

[ChooChooChris]

What many corporate boards fail to understand is the risk management perspective. That is...cost avoidance. It's hard to understand the value of cost avoidance, until people are running around trying to repair the damage. The corporate boards have a choice...spend 100's of thousands of dollars up front for some detection/protection hardware...OR...spend millions for wreck repairs and environmental remediation? Boards that don't "get this" would rather spend the millions after the fact...instead of the usually smaller cost up front. Or in other words, they believe they can save money being reacting instead of preventing. In the meantime, they'll hide behind there...watching our for investor dollars. You know what they say...hind sight is always 20/20! Carl B.

Because in corp USA the only thing that matters is that single quarter or maybe the year. Few companies especially public traded ones think long term impacts. It is always about the stock price that day since at the end of the day that is their actual product. The people running these companies wont be around long enough to care and all bonuses are tied to short term gains as well.