Shortly before 01:15 on 6 July 2013, an unattended Montreal, Maine & Atlantic Railway (MMA) freight train carrying Bakken crude oil rolled away from where it had been parked overnight on a descending grade at Nantes, Quebec, ran roughly 7.2 miles downhill gathering speed to about 65 mph, and derailed in the centre of the town of Lac-Mégantic. Sixty-three tank cars left the rails, many were breached, and the released crude ignited in fires and explosions that killed 47 people and destroyed much of the downtown core. It remains one of the deadliest rail disasters in modern Canadian history and the deadliest involving a runaway.
The train — MMA-002 — was a unit train of 72 Class 111 tank cars carrying approximately 7.7 million litres of petroleum crude oil, plus a buffer car, hauled by five locomotives. It had been left for the night at Nantes by a single operating employee, under MMA’s single-person train operation. The lead locomotive had a history of mechanical trouble; a substandard engine repair allowed oil to accumulate in the turbocharger, which overheated and caught fire after the train was parked. Firefighters shut the engine down, as their protocols required. With the lead locomotive off, the air compressor that kept the brake system charged stopped running. Over the following hour the air slowly leaked away, the brake cylinders lost their grip, and the seven handbrakes that had been set were not enough to hold the train on the grade. It began to roll.
The Transportation Safety Board of Canada (TSB) investigated under file R13D0054 and released its report on 19 August 2014. It did not reduce the catastrophe to a single mistake: it identified 18 distinct causes and contributing factors and located the failure in the operating company and its oversight — a weak safety culture at MMA, inadequate training and supervision, insufficient handbrakes never properly tested, the practice of leaving a loaded dangerous-goods train unattended on a main-line grade, the absence of any additional physical defence against a runaway, and gaps in Transport Canada’s oversight. The Finding is therefore Operator — organizational and oversight failure — not the act of any one employee.
The legal reckoning ran for years and ended without a criminal conviction of the individuals charged. Three former MMA employees were tried on 47 counts each of criminal negligence causing death and acquitted by a jury in January 2018. Separately, MMA and several former employees pleaded guilty to federal regulatory offences; the engineer received a conditional sentence served in the community, and fines were imposed against the bankrupt company. The disaster reshaped North American rules for crude-by-rail, train securement, and tank-car design.
At about 2:39 a.m. on 6 January 2005, Norfolk Southern freight train 192 was running through Graniteville, South Carolina, at roughly 47 mph when it met a mainline switch that had been left lined for an industry siding. The switch diverted the through freight off the main line and into the siding, where it collided head-on with a parked, unoccupied train. Three of train 192’s tank cars carrying chlorine derailed; one was breached, releasing a dense cloud of chlorine gas over the sleeping town. Nine people died, including the engineer of train 192; hundreds were treated for respiratory injury, and about 5,400 residents within a mile of the site were evacuated for days.
The chain of events was not mechanical. The switch at the Avondale Mills industry track was a manually operated, hand-throw switch, and it was the responsibility of a crew to return it to the normal — main line — position after finishing work there. The crew of a local train, train P22, had used the industry track earlier and parked their train clear of the main line. When they secured for the night, the switch was not relined to the main line. It stayed set for the siding. Hours later, train 192, with the right of way and no reason to expect a diverted route, ran into it in the dark.
The National Transportation Safety Board investigated and issued railroad accident report RAR-05/04, adopting it on 29 November 2005. Its probable cause was the failure of the crew of train P22 to return the mainline switch to the normal position after completing their work at the industry track. The Board found a contributing factor in the absence of any feature or mechanism that would have reminded the crew of the switch’s position and prompted them to reline it before leaving — there was nothing in the system to catch the omission. This is an operator/crew finding: a procedural failure in the operation of the railroad, not a defect in a train, a rail, or a tank car’s basic function.
The disaster was, after Lac-Mégantic, among the most consequential American rail-hazmat events of its era. It reshaped how the industry treats the position of hand-thrown switches in dark (unsignaled) territory and intensified scrutiny of how chlorine and other toxic-inhalation-hazard materials are routed and carried by rail.
On the morning of 8 February 1986, a Canadian National Railway freight train ran through a series of signals it was required to obey and collided head-on with an eastbound VIA Rail passenger train near Dalehurst, west of Hinton, Alberta. Twenty-three people died and dozens more were injured. It was, at the time, the deadliest Canadian rail accident in more than three decades, and it remains a defining case in how investigators distinguish between the failure of a person and the failure of a system.
The mechanics were brutally simple. Westbound CN freight train No. 413, hauling three locomotives and 115 cars, was supposed to hold in a siding to let VIA Rail train No. 4 — the transcontinental service that combined the Super Continental and the Skeena — pass on single-tracked territory governed by signal indications. Instead the freight accelerated through an advance signal and a stop signal at the entrance to the Dalehurst siding and continued onto the main line. The two trains met at speed in a curve where neither crew could have seen the other in time. The collision telescoped passenger cars, ruptured diesel and propane tanks, and set off a fire that burned for hours.
A federal Commission of Inquiry was appointed under the Honourable Mr Justice René P. Foisy of the Court of Queen’s Bench of Alberta. Over fifty-six days of public hearings it reconstructed the run of train 413 and examined why a crew of three experienced railroaders failed to stop a train that every signal told them to stop. Crucially, the commission could not say with certainty what the freight crew was doing in the final minutes; the lead-locomotive crew did not survive, and post-mortem tests ruled out alcohol and drugs. The most that could be established was that some combination of inattention, fatigue, or a sudden medical incapacitation of the engineer left the train unchecked.
What the Foisy Commission could establish, and stated forcefully, was the environment in which that failure occurred. It described a CN “railroader culture” that prized loyalty, toughness, and the movement of tonnage over disciplined adherence to safety rules — a culture in which crews changed locomotives “on the fly” without the mandatory brake tests, in which the deadman’s pedal was routinely defeated, and in which the additional reset-safety-control device that might have stopped train 413 had never been fitted to its lead unit. The finding was therefore multi-factor: a human failure on the footplate that the organization around it had made more likely and less recoverable. No individual was prosecuted; the lasting consequences were regulatory.