Basically, The incident prompted the FRA to claim jurisdiction over most tourist railroads. Prior to this many museum groups that had their own track chose to operate under state boiler inspection rules, which were nowhere near as labor intensive. Since Gettysburg this has not been an option.



Not 1472 service days or fifteen years, but a flat sixty months (five years). While ultrasound testing was not required, a complete internal and external visual inspection was, so the boiler had to be stripped and the tubes removed EVERY FIVE YEARS. In this respect, the new rules are a LOT easier for weekend only operations to deal with.

A couple things: Many operations are considered "insular" and are thus not regulated by FRA. Generally, state regulations apply. Yes, this can be pretty scary. No, it doesn't have to be.

In all fairness, both Mississippian engines were pretty well worn out when 76 went to PA.

The NBIC Engineering Standards Committee was working on proposed changes to Part 230 prior to the incident in Gettysburg. Gettysburg just accelerated this work which became one of the first tasks for the tourist/excursion working group of the new FRA Railroad Safety Advisory Committee (RSAC). Many organizations and railroads were members of this group that made recommendations for this "negotiated rule making", including the NTSB.

Reading the "preamble" of the attached regulation, as it was published in the Federal Register in 1999, will give you some real insight on how we have the regulation we have today.

Stay tuned for more potential changes soon.

Mike Ramsey

The one thing I found amazing in the Attachment posted with the above post - in 1910 it was stated there were 2200 railroads in the country (all classes I presume).

And today we have only have 6 Class 1's. I don't have a count for all other classes, however I am sure it is nowhere near 2200.

You presume incorrectly.



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_ ... %80%931929)

I get what you are saying, and it DOES sound callous, BUT, the sad truth is the people involved made choices to ALLOW the locomotive to operate in that condition, and TO operate it in that condition, so my sympathy for them only goes so far. The poor piece of machinery didn't get a vote, so my sympathy DOES go out to it. Feeling sorry for people who make stupid reckless decisions is part of the reasons so many people continue to make stupid reckless decisions every day.

Thank you for your clearer interpretation of what I was trying to state. To borrow from the first "Jurassic Park" film, "Just because you can do it, doesn't mean you should do it". These people had no understanding of the machine, nor how to maintain and operate it. They had no business playing trains with such a fine piece of equipment.

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Here's the major problem. People do stupid things all the time that result in misery, infirmity and death. My wife is a nurse and the one thing I've learned from her is compassion above culpability. You wouldn't believe how many stories I've heard of "frequent flyer" diabetics that offer the excuse that they thought it was ok to knock back a a couple of six packs and a pizza because they were on Metformin, even they were told that diabetes could result in blindness, renal failure or diabetic neuropathy or the need to amputate limbs. How many people do you know doing stupid things that they've been warned over and over will result in harm, and only the timing and severity is at issue.

Of course, to borrow from Pennsylvania's Motor Vehicle Code, the words "careless" and "reckless" have meanings. Careless is an absence due caution, when it's minor, inadvertent, unintentional, infrequent, short term, unavoidable or otherwise mitigated. Reckless on the other hand, is an absence of due caution when its intentional or shows indifference to value of human life, evidenced by the clarity of cause and effect, frequency, repetition, etc.

In this case, it's not clear that the guys on the engine knew what the hell was going on. There's a difference between ignoring the rules and not knowing them. There's an FRA film on this incident and it makes it clear they could answer basic questions and didn't realize that the absence of a bouncing water level was evidence of scale build up and could give a false reading. How do we explain boiler explosions in the steam revenue days when men with years of every day experience somehow didn't keep enough water on the crown sheet?

A couple of years ago, I read the story of a crew shutting down some tuna ovens. Unfortunately, they failed to follow "log-out tag-out" and restarted the ovens when one was still inside. You could say "well, he didn't follow the rules, so he got what he deserved". Few people wouldn't recoil in horror at the prospect of being baked alive and of course most of the blame goes on the guys that restarted the oven without having an affirmative location of the third man, and they were criminally charged.

As a young man, my Grandmother's neighbor used to be visited by a pretty young girl as a child. She grew up, went to college and began working in political campaigns, eventually working for a Massachusetts Senator. You know the rest. I still think drowning in the back of an Oldsmobile is a fearsome consequence to a lapse of prudence, especially if she was naively so enamored of politics that she though politicians were people of honor.

But in those two cases, there's no damaged locomotive to lament. My complaint about being indifferent to the suffering of the crew is that it affirms the idea in The Big Bang Theorythat people who are enthusiastic about trains are socially disaffected
Enfant terribles.

The tragic thing here is not the "loss" of the locomotive. It could be repaired given enough money. The tragic thing is that a person experienced excruciating pain, permanent disfigurement and disability and an abbreviated life.

Given the definition of "reckless" as having the characteristic of "indifferent to the value of human life", perhaps it's reckless to say "they got what they deserved".

Nobody should be surprised by this, given that KSU is no longer a valid stock market ticker symbol (temporarily KSU-P) while the shares remain a trust.


First of all, far from the silly notion that we "deregulated" when President Clinton signed the ICC Termination Act, the railroad industry is far more regulated than it was a quarter century ago. The RSIA brought about PTC with its billions of dollars of expenditures and other regulations such as conductor certification. This encourages "bigness" as a way to lower the per unit cost of compliance, which tends to have a large fixed component/entity. And of course like any other large regulated industry, the major players get something in return-what Warren Buffett calls a "moat". No small railroad will have Class 1 ambitions if it means earlier and more exacting compliance requirements. So they consolidate.

The trend is apparent in other heavily regulated industries as well. Notice how many small and regional banks have disappeared in the wake of Dodd Frank?

Even though Sarbanes Oxley will be 20 years old next summer, and it hasn't resulted in the loss of any firms, its created a moat for the Big 4 (who used to be the "Big 8"). They have nothing to fear, because you simply have to have a certain bank account to audit the Fortune 500 and the PCAOB will never "death penalty" one of only for remaining major firms.

It's not all regulation encouraging consolidation though. The internet and computer technology have reduced search and transaction costs that used to encourage specialization. Diseconomies of scale of scale and scope are mitigated and abated with IT as well.

I just got my latest order from John Pechulis, and I will enjoy watching railroading before so many fallen flags fell-or were the torn down? I think I understand this now:

"Senior citizens wish they were young
Cold hearted orb that rules the night
Removes the colours from our sight
Red is grey and yellow white
But we decide which is right
And which is an illusion?"


Nights in White Satin, Moody Blues

Well I may come off as a hard ass about it, but at age 54, my reservoir of sympathy for people that temp fate with their actions is wearing thin, and being a "foamer" doesn't have anything to do with it. I'm also a big time car guy and posted similar comments about an idiot showing off for a YouTube video and ended up getting run over by his own truck, and I'm a gun guy who has lost patience with people who shoot themselves or someone else because they THOUGHT the gun was empty. Boo hoo hoo. It's ONE thing to accept a ride with a US senator, even a Kennedy, and reasonably assume you will get home alive if not with your dignity intact. It's quite another to work on or operate a steam pressure vessel without FULLY understanding how to do it safely and properly and follow all of the rules. There is just too many things that can go wrong to leave anything to chance. If the crew in the cab couldn't see how poorly the equipment was maintained, they had no business operating the thing. If they knew and ignored it, that's on THEM. If they didn't take it upon themselves to learn and understand the signs of impending disaster, that's on THEM. You can't sit around your whole life waiting for someone else to save you from your own ignorance. I personally wouldn't even DREAM of touching anything in the cab of a steam locomotive without the direct supervision of someone who knows at least 100 times more about them than I do. Have I done some really dumb things in my life and lived to tell the tale? Yes I have, but I have never sought or expected sympathy when I did it either.

"It's quite another to work on or operate a steam pressure vessel without FULLY understanding how to do it safely and properly and follow all of the rules"

The elephant in the room is that word "fully".

How do you know what you don't know or even that you don't know?

I know how my limited my knowledge is, but I had the good fortune of working with people such as the late Bernie O'Brien for years. Every year he taught air brake classes, he would remind us how little we knew and how dangerous it is to become self-assured. I loved his story about taking a coal train down the mountain only to "get a kick in the ass" he wasn't expecting and saying when I got her stopped, I checked my shorts. Not everybody is that lucky to have Yoda teach.

It started early in 1996, when a then fellow volunteer said "this will be a snap" and the recently deceased Mark Brennan wheeled around and said "that is exactly the attitude I want to avoid".

It resonated because I grew up with family history of a Great Uncle George, who died at the age of 19 or so, working as a brakeman for the CNJ at Penobscot Yard on a cold night in January 1927. The story goes that he was doing something that would be considered outlandishly dangerous now, but was common then. His brother, my grandfather was also working there then, and was told "go home, get some sheets, something happened to George. He didn't know what he was doing, and had to experience a hellish second until being cut in half. He didn't know what he didn't know.

I also remember being young once, and taking a "last ride" with a friend who had to sell his Trans-Am TA 6.6. The four of us got in that beast (in the back it sucked) and on a lonely road outside State College he said "let's see what this thing can do". He floored it, and the 400 V-8 roared. When the hood scoop opened, it was like an afterburner. Soon the speedometer hit 120, but it kept accelerating and we used the tach to determine that we were at about 136 when the car started to exhibit "aerodynamic effects". It was only at that point we decided to head back. Now being a college kid at the time, I had no concept of "safety". I don't remember his name any more, or the other two guys and we very well might have died together.

I would still know nothing about it today unless I spent 20 years doing a job for free. Safety for finance guys is avoiding carpal tunnel.

Did I know what we were doing was illegal? Hell yeah. Did we know it was unsafe? No, not until we did it. We just assumed that big motor was matched by suspension, tires and brakes that would support whatever the car was capable of doing.

Look, if somebody gets in a cab, and the glasses don't blow down properly, if they decide they don't have to worry about the two adjoining staybolt leaks knowingly and willingly, then yeah, they are inviting a fearsome thing. But the reports show a poorly trained crew that was unaware of what they needed to know.

So forget a minute my indignation at the latent sociopathy here. If other operators simply shrug and say "oh well, sucks to be them" then they are setting up the next big bang, regardless of the presence of second glass. A little compassion goes a long way to instilling a proper respect for these machines and the need to handle them with care. I care more about mangled people than mangled metal.

Another poster posited that another engine will explode. Given a long enough time frame, every one will explode.

Nota Bene: These engines are already on thin ice for a variety of reasons. Seven or eight years ago, when NS was hosting steam might have been the "Indian Summer" of steam. PTC and PRS make such a thing beyond unlikely at this point (fair notice: I once laughed at the idea that Big Boy would every run, and called a TOD on 1309 about ten times, starting when I saw it in Baltimore in 2005, so I'll be thrilled to be wrong again)

But if there is another boiler explosion, especially one that produces passenger or observer fatalities; it's over. If some politician doesn't mount the soapbox, the FRA and state utilities will ban them, and if none of that happens, you'll never get insurance.

There are people out there with academic certificates, advanced degrees, and even Nobel Prizes for disseminating demonstrably false and fraudulent information.

An associate of mine once begged a library to remove a "business" book from not only its holdings, but its promoted books. Their excuse was "freedom of the press, popular, bestseller." He then pointed out to the library staff that the author had just been sentenced to fifteen years in Federal prison (without much notice in the news media) for the very "investment" and "tax avoidance" strategies outlined in the book in question. They withdrew it for "reconsideration."

We have examples in our own field of people that do a great job of talking and convincing others to do things they shouldn't, or spreading questionable or even false information. And, of course, it is always possible to instill such a degree of irrational fear in people that you could get people to run away from a cold, dead steam locomotive (because asbestos once touched its boiler, it contributed to global warming, it was in the same Commonwealth as Three Mile Island in 1979, someone with COVID breathed on it, whatever). And if we let such misinformation fester and reproduce, the end of any operational rail preservation will be far down the list of societal calamities to come.

Well and fine, but my bigger point is that we as a society have cultivated a culture where EVERYTHING is some else's problem, someone else's responsibility, someone else's fault. At some point we have to break this cycle and take it upon ourselves to be better educated, better informed, more self aware, more skeptical, and less blindly accepting of things around us that might kill us. I work in a environment where there are literately hundreds of ways to seriously hurt or kill yourself every day, and IF you want to go home every day in one piece, the "I didn't know", "nobody told me" and "that's how everybody else does it" just doesn't cut it. I've said my peace now, I'm done with this topic.

Recently I met a young (20 or 30 something) man who has been around steam quite a while and apparently has operated some foreign steam locomotives. Since he was at the Chama steam event, I asked about the Pappas situation and the talk got around to "following the rules" and safety. Some of the things he stated about safety really worries me. The mention of bad stays in a row and other known calamities were met with "as long as you have water in it, it ain't gonna blow up" statement by him. Steam is NOT forgiving, and I worry when folks with not enough smarts become involved in operating it. I think of the admonition; "see tracks, think train" and there should be a corollary, "See Steam, think Safety!" What you don't know, or pay attention to, is what can kill you, and others. This should be drilled into newcomers to steam.
I was taught to trust, but verify; for instance when entering a cab, check the gauges and blow down the sight glass to verify it is functioning and there is water where it should be. Of course this implies that one knows what the gauges should be showing and how the glass should react.
SP used to stencil "Think Safety" on much of their equipment--good idea!

To start, I regret the injuries suffered by the people in the Gettysburg incident.

A couple of things people keep saying:
1. There will be other serious boiler incidents.
2. Another boiler failure could lead to serious negative impacts for the hobby/industry.


1. That is possible, but not likely.
Boiler failures in rail, traction, and industry are extremely rare.
Those in the hobby/industry should probably not be saying that we can expect another boiler "explosion." Some media type who stumbles on this site could run with that and cause a lot of problems -- we all know how knowledgeably the media covers these things!

2. That is possible, but not necessarily true.
I have been watching a tv show called "Mayday." It is an older series, but I just gained satellite access to it. It is quite good, and illustrates air crashes. It shows the known elements of the crashes and the subsequent investigations. Causes include mechanical faults, computer/electronic faults, a range of human errors, and others.
The investigations lead to proposals and sometimes legislation governing the industry, but the planes continue to fly. The Gettysburg event, and the later Medina steam traction engine event did not bring an end to steam operations.
Both of these steam incidents lead to some scrutiny, and efforts by the hobby/industry to learn from what happened and foster greater education about steam operation and potential issues.
I know a little more about the traction engine hobby. Medina caused some jurisdictions to enhance education programs, or start new ones. Many of these were already planned and the incident sped up the process. Overall, it is hard to see that much has changed, because the hobbyists have been generally operating in a safe manner.

Sites like this have been used to expose bad practices. The hobby/industry is wise to stay on top of this and keep this "in house" to some extent. I am not saying to cover up or hide information from the public, but be very careful, and do not allow outside forces to dictate policies that could be ill informed and so, detrimental to your goals.

The air industry likes to say that air crashes are rare, and compared with the global air miles, they are, but they do occur and the loss of life is significant. Like the airline industry, steam hobbyists should highlight the high level of safety in this field.

I can testify that immediately after Medina, we were asked many times when running traction engines, "Will this thing blow up?" That was the narrative people heard over and over again in the media. All we could say was that we were trained, qualified, and licensed to operate, and the boiler was fully inspected and authorized by the appropriate body, and that all of us in the hobby do our best to operate safely. If they wanted to know more, one could explain why the boilers at Medina and Gettysburg failed.

To all on here, have an enjoyable Christmas with your families, and best wishes for a great year in 2022.
Great Western (Canada's innovative pioneer railway!)