Runaway Quebec Train's Owner Battled Safety Issues

[MicaelS]

19. I don't think so, there's more to this story.

There had to have been multiple failures.

As a former brakeman / conductor we never chocked wheels on a main line, or in a siding. I never saw chocks anywhere except in a dedicated car maintenance / repair facility or at a business where they might release the handbrakes and bleed the air off the cars. Chocks can hold 1 or 2 cars, but not a whole train. If a train were just chocked, with enough weight, cars can climb chocks or chocks become dislodged. We always applied the engine air brakes, the train line air brakes, and the hand brakes on each locomotive plus handbrakes on enough cars to hold the train, which could be as many as 50% of the total number of freight cars on the train.

Why weren't the train air brakes fully applied? Why weren't enough handbrakes applied? Even if the train line air went into emergency, the emergency air should have been enough to hold the train unless it was on a terrific downgrade.

Unless some maniac knew what they were doing, and caused this horrific tragedy by deliberately releasing all the brakes.

I'm beginning to think only the engine brakes were applied, no train line air brakes or handbrakes. When they engine brakes bled off because of loss of air, the train rolled away.