An engineer noted his concerns about the length and cargo load of the train that later derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, saying the train was too large and its configuration too unstable to ensure it could operate safely on the designated route, Politico reports. His concerns were dismissed by a company yardmaster who commented, “well, this is what they want.”
“If you talk to the manager, they said this train was 100 percent rule compliant,” the engineer told NTSB inspectors during an interview included in the report released Thursday. “To me, in my opinion, you know, you got 32 percent of the weight on the headend. Twenty percent in the middle and 40 percent weight on the rearend. So, to me, that’s why we reported that to the yardmaster and like I said this is what they want.”
In a separate report coincidentally released Thursday, investigators noted that the last railside monitor that records and transmits data about passing trains had malfunctioned at the time of the accident and failed to transmit data to a Norfolk Southern monitoring station. The monitoring station might have warned safety officials of problems with the train, prompting an inspection of the engine and cars before it entered the populated East Palestine area.