Apparently there are something like 1K derailments a year in the US? Had no idea...Seems pretty high.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2023/02/17/tra...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2023/02/17/tra...
This is a similar discrepancy between the technical meaning of language as used in statistics, and the popular usage of language as the layperson understands it when they read it in the news as happens with the term "mass shooting".
When a layperson hears "train derailment" they think of what happened in Ohio. When a layperson hears "mass shooting" they think of what happened at Uvalde.
In actuality, as far as the statistics are concerned, a train derailment is ANY time a train has a wheel that goes off of the track which is not part of a planned maintenance. These are rarely catastrophic.
In actuality, as far as the statistics are concerned, a mass shooting is ANY time a shooting has more than 3 victims, regardless of location. 99% of these are gang shootings in the inner city, in the 1.3% of US counties that make up 90% of all violent crimes. Arguably, these are always catastrophic, but the cause/solution/surrounding issues are vastly different than the popular topic.
As usual, technical language used in the media is misconstrued and misunderstood by non-technical reporters and lay audiences.
Most derailments are in train yards. Few cause injuries, fewer cause deaths, and only a handful involve hazardous substances. I don't say that to downplay the mess in OH/PA, but just to make sure the base-rate is understood.
And if you want to compare to europe it looks like US freight rail volume is at least 6x as large. Also no idea if/how they count "fender bender" derailments in switching yards. US standard is >$12k in damage according to TFA.
It's confusing to me why this specific incident got so much attention.
And this got the attention it did because it’s far more severe then one load of tar/bitumen in a river - and far more toxic made potentially worse from the choice to. Burn it off to clear the tracks faster
Here's one about a derailment in Nashville. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0dZT7TTQqb4
Here's the one I mentioned about a derailment in middle of nowhere Iowa that dumped tar into the creek. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-HpL0Xk9jTI
Here's one of those local news reports: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_pKVdv-Y6Y
(my dad ended his career in middle-management with a railroad—not Norfolk, but for all I know Norfolk owns the one he worked for now, there was a lot of consolidation—and for a few years he had to travel to derailments in his region, when they happened, and derailments happened somewhat often)
Here is a poorly made website which can generate reports on this:
https://safetydata.fra.dot.gov/officeofsafety/publicsite/que...
Every time the government spends my tax dollars developing a web page with a form that generates reports, an angel gets it's wings.
Edit: less than 100 (Entgleisungen).
The US rail network also >2x longer than Europe[3] (360,000km vs 151,000km).
[1] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/198443/us-class-i-freigh...
[3] https://www.floridarail.com/news/6-key-differences-between-a...
I highly doubt that the US rail network is twice the size of the EU one by most metrics, I guess different methods for counting length were mixed there (e.g. how is single-track vs double-track counted).
This is taking europe as in the EU, as anything else is annoying.
It'd also be pretty interesting to get the frequency of passenger rail derailments vs freight derailments to more accurately compare the numbers given the high amount of passenger rail in EU. As a very rough idea, the first document I found giving any indication about the distribution had 2 dangerous freight derailments and 3 dangerous passenger train derailments in germany for 2021 (https://www.eisenbahn-unfalluntersuchung.de/SharedDocs/Downl... P. 16ff.).
The EU also differs from the US in that that cargo trains are much shorter, leading to more trains needed for the same amount of freight cars. So the question is does the rate of derailments scale with the number of individual cars or with the number of trains?
EDIT:
Looking at the floridarail.com link, they say that the US has a broader gauge than europe. Since almost all of the US is standard gauge and almost all of europe is standard gauge or wider, this is just wrong. It's also news to me that europe (specifically germany) doesn't allow toxic chemicals to be transported over rail. The article seems a bit iffy.
You have to take in a much larger number of factors than that.
The railroad industry is currently pushing their new just in time paradigm which has been leading to attempted strikes in the US (Uncle Joe says no) by the railroad workers. The railroad operators are pushing for longer trains, less engineers per train, and less inspection time per car while also playing computerized shipping optimizations that put the number of 'hazards' on a train just below the regulated minimum number of cars so they don't have to declare it.
It's just ironic that this incident that got national news happened so quickly after the railroad co's got their no right to strike validated. It looks like it could very well be their undoing.
[0] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
That extrapolates to be in roughly the same ballpark (only by a factor of ~2x off) with what this sibling comment pointed out: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34886899
The EU-27 transported 2,927 billion ton-kilometres of rail freight, the US ~2,200 billion ton-kilometres.
> "Rail freight activity in Europe, measured in tonne-kilometers, grew from 339 Billion tonne-km in 2003 to 398Billion tonne-km in 2019" Page 14
https://erfarail.eu/uploads/The%20European%20Rail%20Freight%...
I do see that the rates are broadly similar between Canada and the US, which is not a surprise but does suggest a correlation.
Plus we have gauges issues that the US don't, so this much disparity is concerning.