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Originally Posted by Diaphone Jim

Train air-brakes do operate on the same principle as truck brakes.
It is unreasonable to expect the Chairman of the railway to know this.

"unreasonable"? I do expect them to know this, even when there hasn't just been a disaster, and when there has been a brake-related disaster, I'd expect them to learn the facts before speaking publicly.

Perhaps I am a tad naive.

But if you're right about the brakes (and I suspect you are) then ... how did this all happen again?

Originally Posted by CaliforniaMama

Mr Lambert says fire crews told a company dispatcher what they did at the time, but says there was no discussion of the brakes.

"We were there for the train fire. As for the inspection of the train after the fact, that was up to them," he said.

Sounds reasonable to me.

It is not immediately clear what the dispatcher did after speaking with the fire service.

Mr Burkhardt says the fire service should have also tried to contact the train's operator, who was staying at a nearby hotel.

"If the engine was shut off, someone should have made a report to the local railroad about that," he said.

Didn't they attempt to do that when they contacted the dispatcher?

This was my reading at first, but I think "company dispatcher" refers to the emergency operator (dispatcher) of the fire "company", not the train company.

Plus, earlier it says:

Ed Burkhardt, the chairman of Montreal, Maine & Atlantic Railway, says the engine had been left on by the train's engineer to maintain pressure in the air brakes.

He says as the pressure gradually "leaked off", the air brakes failed and the train began to slide downhill.

That implies that the engineer knew about the fire and knew that the firefighters turned the engine off since it clearly says the engineer left the engine on. He must have turned it back on after the firefighters were finished, right?

Sounds like the engineer was trying to follow protocol.

From the information presented here, I say the engineer is at fault for not inspecting the engine and making sure that the problem was fixed since the operation of the engine was vital to the operation of the brakes. He knows the machine better than anyone and he knew there had been a fire from some type of problem with a fuel or oil line leak.

It was up to him to fully inspect and make sure his engine was safe for operation. If that fuel or oil line leaked again, it may have caused the engine to be unable to maintain the pressure in the brakes . . .

Again, my reading is that the engineer stopped the train, left the engine and handbrake on, and went off to the hotel to sleep the night. (what, trains can't run at night in Canada???) The fire occurred, the fire crew put it out and turned off the engine. The train driver was - I think - never informed of the fire or the engine shut-down.

If Nantes is the same sort of whistlestop town as Lac Megantic, they might just have a small or even volunteer-only fire brigade, and between them and an undertrained dispatcher, I could well imagine them getting this minor (but important) detail wrong. "Fire's out, leave it til morning to survey the damage" seems reasonable.

Although, it could be a case of the company not keeping their equipment up-to-date and in good working order because they wanted the bottom line to look good at all times.

Well, that was my first suspicion.