Distracted rail crew missed warning before fiery B.C. train crash, report says

The Transportation Safety Board says a fiery collision between two Canadian Pacific Kansas City freight trains in British Columbia last year highlights the need for "physical defences" to prevent crashes.

The board says the collision east of Revelstoke, B.C., on Feb. 16 last year occurred when a rail crew was distracted by a call from a controller and missed a warning known as a "clear to stop indication" to prepare to stop at the next signal.

The report says the crew hit the emergency brake when they finally saw the tail lights of the stationary train on the same tracks but they couldn't stop in time.

The report released Monday says two crew in the moving train were injured, one seriously, when their train derailed, with one locomotive catching fire and spilling 17,500 litres of diesel fuel.

Four carriages of the stationary train also derailed, spilling about 400 tonnes of grain.

The TSB says that after the crash, it sent a safety advisory letter to Transport Canada drawing attention to the incident and three other collisions involving trains that had received "restricting signal indications."

CPKC says in a written statement that it has taken actions since the crash, including additional safety blitzes and awareness training.

In its statement, the company says that a module on situational awareness is now part of its conductor training and that its overall program includes training about respecting signal indications.

It says all workers have had to watch a five-minute video that "demonstrates what can happen if employees lose situational awareness and fail to respect the signal."

TSB notes lack of physical fail-safes

It says it then sent a safety advisory letter to CPKC telling the company that "in the absence of backup physical defences to prevent collisions, it may wish to review its procedures for avoiding distraction in critical operating situations."

"Both these safety advisory letters highlight the continuing absence of physical fail-safe train controls and the absence of effective interim measures to help ensure the success of administrative defences for trains operating under restricting signals," the board says in a news release.

The board says it's made repeated recommendations about the need to follow railway signal indications, a safety issue that has been on its watchlist since 2012. 

It says that while Transport Canada and the railway industry have been discussing a framework to address the issue for more than a decade, "the work is not sufficiently advanced to indicate when additional physical safety defences will be implemented."