CN Rail faces 5 charges over 2005 spill in B.C. river
This event made me so angry I have a difficult time writing coherently about it. Naturally the official enquiry looked at what happened on the day of the incident - and immediately preceding it. But there is an awful sense that this incident - or something very like it was entirely predictable. While CN, quite properly, will carry the can, the real perpetrator in my mind is Gordon Campbell. He bears the ultimate responsibility. For it was he who said unequivocally, prior to his election, that he would not privatize BC Rail, and then did exactly that.
BC Rail’s operational route from North Vancouver to Lillooet has always been very difficult. It was hard to build and worse to operate. BC Rail had built up a wealth of experience about running trains on a steep and winding track. That experience was lost when CN took over, as they bought out the contracts of staff who understood why it was important that things be done the way they were. CN brought in its own people and started to “rationalise” the locomotive fleet. The operation of the southern end of the line is actually not critical to CN as they have their own route to the north from Vancouver, which is easier and cheaper to run. They were obliged to keep it going for the first five years of the lease but will obviously abandon the route as soon as they can.
So the take over was about cutting costs. Fewer, longer trains. But without the local knowledge that would have told them that this was a risky undertaking and without the specific knowledge about how to keep the distributed power all pulling in the same direction. Yes, CN must bear responsibility for their cavalier attitudes. But so must the BC Government for abandoning its commitments. It is also important to note that when it was sold off it was actually doing quite well. Many of the problems had been understood and rectified. The similarities with British rail are interesting. Arguably, BR just before it was broken up was doing better than it ever had- and that is in commercial accounting terms, not just social cost benefit.
But social CBA is why governments have to be in the railway business. Trying to make railways commercially viable in all their aspects is just a sop to the road lobby - who by no means pay for the full social costs of their infrastructure and get much more subsidy now than the railways did on the heyday. If for no other reason than the fact that a steel wheel on a steel rail is still the most efficient way to transfer energy from its source to motive power, governments must support railways in a world that has already run out of cheap energy.
The privatization of British Railways lead to a series a rail disasters - unprecedented in the system’s history - mainly due to the separation of responsibilities between track and train operations. The privatization of BC Rail was done differently but had a hideously similar result - though the human death toll has been much lower. Both are the results of dogmatic insistence that private businesses are better than public ones. This is not only wrong, it is willfully ignorant. Businesses were taken into public ownership - especially railways - because the private sector failed to meet legitimate public needs. There are values that are not always captured well by the market - if at all. And if we are to achieve important societal objectives - like having safe trains - then some measure of public control and cost support is inevitable. Just staring at the bottom line all the time means you miss out things which are important. Like ecosystems.
And no sooner did I finish this piece, and look at my RSS feeds than I turn up this headline
CN train aflame near Prince George
Somebody needs to care, somebody needs to act, somebody needs to wake up.
Hello, my name is Stephen Rees too and I just googled my name and this is what came up. This was also quite funny because my birthday is on the 4th of August.
Welcome. I have tried the same thing, and I am quite surprised at the number of us there are - especially as no-one else seems to spell it correctly (both Stephen and Rees are usually rendered wrongly).
There is a flickr group called Steve United too
I can remember when Gordon Campbell held his meeting with CP, CN and BN chief executive officers who gave presentations which were on the web. Their presentations given at the meeting in Prince George were about how class 3 railways, regional railways, were being squeezed out in North America. Also, interestingly, they also noted that track and operations responsibilities had to be run by one enterprise. Maybe they were trying to eliminate previous arrangements such as Northern Alberta Railways, a shared venture between CP and CN.
The CN bid was interesting. They claimed to want to divert traffic north to the Prince Rupert - Prince George line. Also, they actually proposed linking the BC Rail line at Clinton to the CN mainline at Ashcroft. The southern section would be abandoned and used for Sea-to-Sky highway construction. The bid team claimed this would save the provincial government millions.
I wonder now if they turned down a better offer than they got. If they do abandon the line south of Clinton, they are under no obligation to connect to Ashcroft. This would have been beneficial to shippers wanting a quicker route south than the convoluted route through McBride and Kamloops. Also, VIA Rail could have routed their transcontinental passenger service through Prince George, keeping the Cariboo connected. Instead a cruise train which doesn’t stop in the Cariboo now plies the old BCR route.
I haven’t read the contract between CN and the BC government or CN and Rock Mountaineer, but it seems to have been described in the media as needing to continue longer than the five years. Maybe CN wants to abandon the route to a short-line which would fulfill its obligations to Rocky Mountaineer.
Love your blog. Professionally written and researched. If only the main-stream media (and I include CBC) would read this.
Actually, I know that some of the main stream media do read this blog, and you can see comments by professional journalists to some articles. I do get calls from journalists too, but they do tend to go for short quotes, and I like to run on a bit. I am also pleased to note that readership is growing (see my piece on blogstats), although it will never be as popular as cats that talk funny.