Antelope by the dozens...

btabin said:
Trains take a long time to stop. Doubt it was intentional. You can even hear the air horn being used (to no avail).
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Well I lived in a small Northern Ontario Town right beside The Canadian Pacific Mainline for over twenty years.

One summer afternoon a freight train was going by, maybe not full speed but it was moving along pretty good and all of a sudden all it's brakes came on and it was unbelievable how fast that train stopped.

I said to my buddy somebody just bought it. And sure enough some poor guy jumped in front of the train after his girl had broken off their relationship.

My point was that they could have throttled down the engines and at least tried to do something rather than just plow through.
 
Northshore said:
Well I lived in a small Northern Ontario Town right beside The Canadian Pacific Mainline for over twenty years.

One summer afternoon a freight train was going by, maybe not full speed but it was moving along pretty good and all of a sudden all it's brakes came on and it was unbelievable how fast that train stopped.

I said to my buddy somebody just bought it. And sure enough some poor guy jumped in front of the train after his girl had broken off their relationship.

My point was that they could have throttled down the engines and at least tried to do something rather than just plow through.
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Someone jumping in front of a train is grounds for putting on the emergency brakes. Wildlife is not a good reason for emergency brakes. And I highly doubt the train would've been as loaded as the trains are in Alberta and nowhere near the speed either.
 
I am very familiar with operating freight trains, and that engineer could have attempted to slow down as soon as he had a visual on the herd.
It's almost as if he enjoyed running over these animals.

Another thing of note is CP will easily be able to find which crew was on that train at that time, if they do I guarantee that the engineer will lose his job. Not for hitting the animals but for filming and releasing it to the media. It is a CP and Transport Canada rule that we are not allowed to have phones turned on while on duty. It is clearly not the forward facing dash cam, the dash cam is pretty much centred in the windshield and here you can clearly see the sand compartment cap on the right side of the nose.
 
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jhnvan said:
Someone jumping in front of a train is grounds for putting on the emergency brakes. Wildlife is not a good reason for emergency brakes. And I highly doubt the train would've been as loaded as the trains are in Alberta and nowhere near the speed either.
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Actually the maple creek subdivision is 60mph track. Most track in Alberta is 45 or 50mph max speed. If it was a loaded potash train headed west it was probably 200 cars and 5 locomotives with a weight of 28,000 tons
 
Yes lot’s of moose meet their demise in the winter , no place to go when the train is coming down the tracks !
Leavenworth
bunny said:
I talk to an old engineer that ran trains to tumbler ridge, he told me about the multiple-hundreds of moose that he had run over in northern B.C. especially when the snow banks trapped them on the tracks.
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Completely unavoidable. Do you people think the train should have swerved? Why didn't the antelope wait at the traffic crossing? Didn't they read the "Stay Off The Tracks" signs? Sheesh people.
 
the spank said:
There is groups dedicated to antelope conservation and improvement projects. In fact there is a group in AB making good headway at getting landowners to allow removal of the bottom wire on pasture fencing to allow antelope to pass freely on their dedicated travel routes to preferred seasonal & breeding habitats since they don't jump fences like a deer will.
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Fences are a start but they don’t kill antelope by the hundreds like trains and trucks when the snow is deep.
This is a good recommendation in the global article that would be reasonable to expect from CP considering the antelope have been migrating long before the trains.

CP would not clarify to Global News what its safety protocols are with regards to wildlife, but wildlife expert from Lethbridge College Terry Kowalchuk suggested some simple options:

-slowing trains down seasonally with animal migration patterns

-creating exit points for animals to exit the tracks

-stopping at road crossings to allow for animals to pass.
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Buckmastr said:
Fences are a start but they don’t kill antelope by the hundreds like trains and trucks when the snow is deep.
This is a good recommendation in the global article that would be reasonable to expect from CP considering the antelope have been migrating long before the trains.
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Actually, the leading cause of antelope deaths is adverse weather, a severe winter regularly decimates our herds.

Grizz
 
The elevated track has deep hard snow on the sides of it. Same as the ditch on a highway. That’s why they don’t easily get off when threatened by a truck or train.
 
This reminds me of people being afraid to fly, because when a plane goes down there are a lot of fatalities with the one incident.
Same here - 1 incident, a good number of fatalities.

Everyone forgets about the "deer-vehicle" collisions that take place about every 8 minutes daily in the state of Michigan
Or the 75,000 deer killed every year in NY state.
PA, OH have similar statistics - lots of animals killed, just one at a time.

Trains dont stop on a dime, neither do cars. Animal vehicle collisions will continue to happen.
Simple as that
 
Hitting the antelope with that train may have been unavoidable. But helping antelope get off of roads and tracks isn’t. Blame the winter fine, but they were killed as a result of industry failing to give them a chance when they are most vulnerable.
 
Buckmastr said:
Hitting the antelope with that train may have been unavoidable. But helping antelope get off of roads and tracks isn’t. Blame the winter fine, but they were killed as a result of industry failing to give them a chance when they are most vulnerable.
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So, what do you think industry should do? Stop all the trains until spring? - dan
 
dan belisle said:
So, what do you think industry should do? Stop all the trains until spring? - dan
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The antelope don't winter on train tracks, they get stuck there on their migration through.
The global article suggested:

but wildlife expert from Lethbridge College Terry Kowalchuk suggested some simple options:

-slowing trains down seasonally with animal migration patterns

-creating exit points for animals to exit the tracks

-stopping at road crossings to allow for animals to pass.
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Level crossings without low fences would help as these herds have migrated through the same spots for hundreds of years. They end up on the tracks off the road crossings and there is often a great distance between the next road crossing
 
dan belisle said:
So, what do you think industry should do? Stop all the trains until spring? - dan
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Nah, just put cow catchers back on the trains. The threat to Antelope in particular isn’t being hit, it’s being run over. When they take off running, they can nearly match the speed of the train. The impact speed when the train reaches them is very low. A padded cow catcher would shove them off to the side where they’d tumble into the snow.

Wouldn’t help moose or elk, but at least antelope would have a better chance.

2-B7370-CC-2085-4-F08-A04-E-67-F10-C03-A2-BF.jpg
 
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