When I first posted the link, there was some info given to Railway Age by an anonymous CP employee, that was not retained in the update, which was apparently placed on the same URL. Luckily, the Internet Archive's "Wayback Machine" had saved a snapshot of the page as it existed yesterday, from which I extracted the following:
"“One CP Rail employee — who asked not to be named as he was not permitted to speak on the matter publicly — said the speed limit heading into the tunnels is a maximum of about 20 mph. He said the final radio dispatch from the train as it was heading into the Upper Spiral Tunnel reported a speed of about 47 mph. ‘That’s one of the steepest grades on CP, coming down from the top of the hill,’ said the employee. ‘There’s actually instructions in our timetable about how to come down that hill, like where you should be setting the brakes here and here. It’s very specific and if you do one wrong move, you’re done for.’ The employee said that protocol dictates an emergency brake be applied if a train reaches 3 mph over the limit on that stretch of track, suggesting that cold weather or a mechanical failure may have been a factor. A second CP Rail source confirmed the train’s speed when exiting the tunnel was well beyond the mandated limits. [Teamsters Canada Rail Conference] representative Greg Edwards said he doesn’t know if frigid temperatures played a role in the crash: ‘Cold isn’t good for train brakes and things, but we’ve been operating in the winter for years and years and years.’”"
I leave it to the experienced engineers here to make of the above what they will.
---PCJ
