Documents reveal what really happened to the Stanley Park train

Posted June 28 2023 09:47pm

The Stanley Park train was pulled out of service last year and now documents obtained by Global News show the beloved miniature railroad failed a safety inspection. The train fell into such disrepair under the last park board......

https://globalnews.ca/video/9800697/doc ... park-train

Remember, always keep your rails polished!

Deferred Maintenance - same thing got a number of Class 1's - PC springs to mind

No doubt compounded by folding the maintenance into a larger body with its primary skills involving motor vehicles.

I wonder if some of the mechanics who took a look at the equipment wondered where the steering wheel was.

OK, I'm being a bit sarcastic there, but that may not be too far from the truth. I've actually seen a mother telling her little boy about the controls on an interurban that included a "steering wheel" (hand brake) and a "brake pedal" (bell).

Do I think the mechanics were really that bad? No, but I do think there was a lot about the railroad they didn't know because they didn't work with it. For instance, we know how track has to be maintained to a certain tolerance, and the tolerance also includes proper measurements for gauge and wear on wheels. Those are things that are not present with motor vehicles on rubber tires--and I doubt anybody in management thought to tell anybody doing the work about things like that.

I can only imagine what things might have been like if the railroad actually had steam power. I'm reminded of Jay Leno's remarks about his steam cars, in which he says you have to forget almost everything you know about regular automobiles to work on or operate steam. One thing he emphasizes is how in a gas car, you are trying to get rid of excess heat, while with steam you work to keep heat in!!

That's just one example of how different steam is from internal combustion.

Sheesh, can you imagine the learning curve for steam mechanics during the transition to diesel power on a railroad?

This is also being followed on at least two Facebook pages, one of which is dedicated to C. P. Huntington park trains. The following comment is from the C. P. Huntington site.



I'll add that one of the locomotives is modified from what Chance normally built. It's the one patterned after the first locomotive to arrive in Vancouver:



The image is from this article.


https://www.vancouverisawesome.com/high ... QdEMpODTuY

Bottom line is there was no one name as ultimately responsible, and it just fell to the bottom of the list.

Even if they aren't skilled, someone who has their name on the door as responsible will probably make some progress.

Rather indicative of anything Govt manages. If it won't get a Politician Votes or a Bureaucrat promoted, they don't care.

This bit of news reminds me of a steel mill railroad I did some consulting work for many years ago. Pretty much the same issues. The railroad had devolved to daily derailments and break downs. Root cause, was of course, maintenance. The bean counters had folded the railroad maintenance (track and mechanical) into the plant maintenance, and over time, the unique knowledge of how to maintain "trains" had simply disappeared, with turn-over, retirements, seniority, etc.

For instance I remember that they had stopped maintaining traction motor blowers, because "the engines work OK without them". They couldn't understand why flash-overs skyrocketed in the nasty steel-mill environment. We recommended maintaining the blowers and the expensive traction motor failures dropped. Four inch side-bearing clearance resulted in putting a molten steel car in the river, but that's a story for another day.

If you read the next post after yours, you will find your anti government bias misses the mark.


Try public anti taxes propaganda and private bean cutters leading to the same starvation diet for the folks on the ground with tools in their hands trying to keep things running for just one more day.


As someone who survived the pre Staggers Act reforms, you probably have no idea how atrocious the North East Freight Railroads sank too.

One could practically harvest a corn crop on a "High Speed Main Line".

Brian

I am reminded of a proverb attributed to the Chinese--"Fire is a good servant but a bad master."

I think we can substitute "money" for "fire" very easily--and may find it even more true.

Doesn't matter if the entity is capitalist or socialist, the same wrong money-only focus leads to the same bad results for the same foolishly frugal reasons.

I would suggest reading "Enterprise Denied" by Albro Martin, Columbia University Press. He details how many of those problems were inflicted by Govt. When Al Perlman was testifying before Harley Staggers about why the Penn Central failed, Perlman pointed out much of the Penny's & NYC's issues resulted from Govt. interference in the form of interference in rates, regulations and excessive local taxes.
Staggers to his credit investigated Perlman's claims and found them to be accurate, which led to the passage of what we know as the Staggers Act.

300 plus pages of violations? That sounds a bit exaggerated. Maybe there are 300 plus pages of regulations that need to be followed and there was a slight misunderstanding by the news reporter. Are these public documents that can be accessed by me? (I'm not versed on Canadian right to information policy).

If there is enough public interest in keeping this "beloved" attraction running, one would think a friend's group, or some other outside support group could perform some or even most of the work to keep the trains rolling.

There is a huge difference between the very legitimate criticism of excessive government regulations and blasting any government employee as being a @#$%^&*&^%$%$ F@#$%^&*^%^tard.

Brian Helfrich

Retired MOW Peon - the very same day I was eligible for a full RRB pension from the Devil's Railroad.

The same violation repeated many times would also count as "300 pages of violations".

Can someone point me to a source document or online posted copy of the safety report that includes the "300 pages of violations"?

Something the Transport Canada TSB is fond of, which might be common to other Canadian safety report presentation, is the listing of technical legal or statutory violations right along with substantive safety violations, often in such a way as to create a poor impression of the company involved as a scofflaw. In the case of the zoo train, problems with the radiator are not on the same level as Every Single Car Brake Having Issues. Technical Safety BC said November 9th (2022) that they could not release their report "due to freedom of information legislation" (which seems strange as a grounds, in particular since Global News says they obtained their "documents" through a Freedom of Information request). To my knowledge neither the agency nor park officials have posted any more detailed information.

If I recall correctly there was some community effort to provide funding to get the trains open for the Christmas-holiday celebrations, before the independent engineering study was conducted, but the park board did not consider it -- and it will be interesting to see if the community aid will cover the possibly-enhanced scope of work needed after the full engineering study is open for discussion.

I do think the report would be a valuable thing for many participants here to read and study.

The Web site at stanleyparkvan.com indicates that Summer Train operation is 'unlikely' and that the Halloween Ghost Train and Bright Nights Christmas Train are, as of mid-July 2023, "TBD".