Can someone address what seems to me a bald-faced lie about the train derailment?

[MicaelS]

15. Well its one of those "CYA" type of things.

The RR is telling you if you don't do it right, it is YOUR ass that will blamed, not theirs (as is happening right now in this situation), as they told you to "Always do the Safe Action".

You are supposed to use your judgement based on total train weight, number of cars and grade. In a worst case scenario you are supposed to set a handbrake on EVERY single car and locomotive. But in my years no one ever did that. We did not have extremely severe grades in most places we might have to tie a train down here, in the territory where I worked, which was Galveston to Fort Worth. Not like what I have read of what is was in Canada which is a 1.2% grade.

Here in Texas, we would do a max of 25% of the cars on a fully loaded coal, rock or grain "unit" train. A unit train is a train consisting of one single commodity. Max number of cars would be 120 cars @ 130 tons per car (short tons, not long tons), since that is as long and heavy as the RRs wanted to run down here. So that would have been 30 cars, plus 4 locomotives with handbrakes set, PLUS the main train line air set down to max braking power, which would be 35 pounds of air set. The train would NOT be placed into emergency, because as I have stated earlier, you can bleed off the brakes of an entire train which is in emergency.