Hard-to-detect braking system defects have rendered Canada’s aging fleet of grain hoppers a safety hazard, says a former director of derailment investigations for the country’s Transportation Safety Board (TSB), reports Railway Age.
Ian Naish, who retired from the TSB in 2009, in a CBC interview posted May 15, declared, “the grain car fleet overall is quite defective.”
Naish’s warning followed his former employer’s Rail Safety Advisory Letter dated April 20, 2020, which said that the standard visual inspection of brake pipe connections and piston applications is unreliable and does not reveal a high percentage of malfunctioning railcar brakes.
