Railworks America

Preliminary NTSB report should be out tomorrow. Won't change the situation on the ground which has gone from hysteria to nonsense but maybe at least we will get some answers about what went wrong.

The crew operating a freight train that derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, did not receive a critical warning about an overheated axle until just before dozens of cars went off the tracks, federal safety investigators said in a report Thursday.

An engineer slowed and stopped the train after getting a “critical audible alarm message," according to a preliminary report by the National Transportation Safety Board. The crew then saw fire and smoke and alerted dispatch of a possible derailment, the report said.

The axle investigators are focused on had been heating up as the train went down the tracks, but did not reach the threshold for stopping the train and inspecting it until just before the derailment, the report said. The train was going about 47 mph (75 kph) at the time, just under the speed limit of 50 mph (80 kph), according to safety investigators.

Christopher Barkan, director of the Rail Transportation and Engineering Center at the University of Illinois, said the spacing of the sensors that recorded the temperatures of the Norfolk Southern train — 10 and 20 miles (16 to 32 kilometers) apart — is common in the industry.

He said the detectors would not have notified the train crew of elevated bearing temperatures unless they met the threshold for action.

“I don’t see anything wrong here, but we just don’t know,” Barkan said.

Homendy said investigators would look at whether industry safety standards — including high-temperature alarm thresholds and sensor spacing — will need to change to prevent similar derailments.