TSB Incident Report on VIA 692

VIA 693 meets CN safely in Winnipeg in 2009

I guess I will be posting one more VIA-related item. You may recall that on October 29, 2011 there was a near miss between VIA 692 (the Hudson Bay returning from Churchill) and CN 853. I noticed a small update two months ago.

The Transportation Safety Board has issued their findings. You can go read it - I encourage you to, it is quite readable - but the gist of the findings is that the VIA crew forgot they were supposed to take the siding at Meharry to meet CN 853 and instead carried on until the CN crew saw VIA 692's headlights and called them on the radio to stop. That was a close call.

The CN Togo subdivision is Occupancy Control System (OCS) territory, commonly known as "dark" territory because there are no signals. The TSB report emphasizes that crews must remember their orders and use visual cues like mileboards, station calls on the radio, etc. to recall special orders like the meet with CN 853 that was specified in their train orders. Clearly the VIA crew did not remember and the close call was the result.