WELLINGTON, Kansas — No injuries were reported after 18 cars of grain from a Union Pacific train derailed near Wellington on Saturday evening, CBS News reports.
The railroad told CBS, “Crews have cleared the derailed cars, and track repairs are currently underway.”
The derailment occurred about 5 p.m. Wellington is about 30 miles south of Wichita, Kan.
It was the second UP derailment in three days. On Thursday, KTVX-TV reported “multiple cars” derailed at UP’s yard in Ogden, Utah, according to a UP spokesman. That derailment resulted in a spill of magnesium chloride, a material used as dietary supplement that can be “mildly irritating to the eyes and respiratory tract,” according to the TV station.
Where is Upton Sinclair when you need him. This talk of making sausage makes me nauseated if that’s how congress expects to treat railroad safety!
“Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown on Sunday touted the need for new bipartisan rail safety legislation weeks after the toxic train derailment in East Palestine sparked an uproar over existing regulations and precautions for rail companies.
“It shouldn’t take a rail disaster to get us working together like that. And that’s what we’re going to be doing,” Brown told ABC “This Week” anchor George Stephanopoulos.
The Democratic lawmaker said he believed his proposal, backed by him and Ohio’s Republican senator, J.D. Vance, among others, could pass their chamber even if its prospects in the House were less clear. President Joe Biden endorsed the legislation Thursday and encouraged Congress to act quickly on it.”
It has begun. The fox guarding the hen house has not worked well. The chickens are coming home to roost. A relentless pursuit to attain a near-Zero O.R. (OK, a 50 O.R.) has awakened a sleeping giant.
How can a representative vote against a “safety” bill? It’s the quintessential “Have you stopped beating your wife?” gotcha question. If you say yes, that means you beat your wife. If you say no, that means you are still beating your wife. Damned if you do and damned if you don’t.
The end result will be legislation written by politicians who know nothing about the industry. Writing legislation is very much like making sausage; the ingredients go into a hopper, with sausage coming out the other end. The sausage may or may not be edible. (I’ve written municipal ordinances that addressed specific problems. After they were re-written by council members and their special interests, the ordinances no longer solved the problems, and made it more difficult to address the problems.)