Talk:List of rail accidents in Canada

Feedback from New Page Review process

I left the following feedback for the creator/future reviewers while reviewing this article: Good work!.

JW 1961 Talk 18:28, 11 December 2020 (UTC)

Thank you! Julius177 (talk) 19:09, 11 December 2020 (UTC)

@Julius177: You no doubt had in mind only to include significant accidents in the article. Since derailments and railway crossing accidents are quite common, how would significance be determined? Factors might be number of cars derailed, potential environmental damage, severity of injuries, and number of people affected. When a train plows into a section crew, how great a value of equipment should be damaged to be notable? When a train wheel crushes a pedestrian's limb, would that be included? What about a track walker being fatally struck by a train? I assume if rocks or icicles fell from a tunnel roof and killed multiple railway employees it would be excluded. I cite these examples because I've been inserting such incidents into Wikipedia articles that I've expanded for various localities. However, lacking access to complete databases, I am well aware that I've only been scratching the surface. Is there any way to access and search a complete set of railway incident reports? I have only read one or two held in local libraries. DMBanks1 (talk) 23:13, 21 April 2021 (UTC)

@Julius177: To enhance the present list, it might prove useful to search List of rail accidents by decade. By inserting "Canada" into the "Find on page" item in the drop box, Canada entries will be highlighted. However, these are neither complete lists, nor do I believe many incidents are sufficiently significant to be included in the article you created. Clear examples of the endless omissions are 1977 W of Connaught Tunnel, and 1968, 2015 Beavermouth. I believe only the Connaught incident from these two articles is sufficiently significant for your article, which is why it is important at this juncture for contributors to reach some agreement as to the criteria for inclusion. The List of rail accidents in the United Kingdom evidences no criteria, so every incident appears eligible for inclusion. Merely from the little work I've done on UK stations, I know the UK list could be easily increased at least one hundredfold by anyone willing the spend unlimited hours going through key UK online resources. For Canada, now is the time to make a choice of whether to include everything, only the extremely notable, or somewhere in between. Unfortunately, our Canadian online resources compare poorly to the UK ones. DMBanks1 (talk)

I think it's an interesting question. As you can obviously see, I went for accidents which mainly already had their own article first and foremost. Substantial reporting in the media is something I've taken as a reasonable shorthand for an accident being worthwhile of inclusion; for example, you can see that I've added several 2021 derailments which were widely reported in Canadian media even though they did not result in deaths or injuries, whereas most of the historical derailments involved at least one death, or are significant to Canadian railway history even if they did not directly result in deaths or injuries (e.g. the 1979 Mississauga incident). I think it is also a question of whether or not this list would be the best place for full coverage of accidents per region or per railway, for example. With a high level of contributions I could see the list becoming very large very quickly even if we only focused on a) widely-reported incidents, b) incidents which involved a significant number of deaths or injuries, as there were quite a number of these in the 19th and early 20th centuries. I deliberately chose to make the list inclusive of maintenance-of-way incidents and impacts on railway personnel as a focus exclusively on passengers or non-railway personnel would potentially introduce regrettable bias, and there is at least one notable incident (1910 Rogers Pass avalanche), so I firmly believe that incidents like these should be included as long as they have a similar level of significance to other accidents. I think as the list gets longer, we will need to restructure it anyway, and ideally that should happen in a way which minimizes duplication with other articles, especially other list articles, such as the worldwide lists by decade that you mentioned. I think breaking it up by decade or region would not help much, as the former would duplicate the worldwide lists (especially since in its current table format, this list is default-ordered and sortable by date anyway) and the latter doesn't add much useful information. There also isn't a coherent way to alphabetize it. What I have noticed is that given the historical prevalence in Canada of most railway operations being concentrated into a handful of large companies/conglomerates, you would expect specific coverage of accidents for those companies to be more prevalent, such as with List of accidents on British Rail. Unfortunately this doesn't seem to be the case, and instead rail companies only have short sections in their main articles, e.g. Canadian National Railway#Derailments, which in the case of CN seems to bafflingly include a number of relatively insigificant events without including significant ones, including ones that have their own article like the Hinton train collision. There seems to be an implicit focus in this coverage on events of the last 20 years, which admittedly is a reasonable editorial choice as it would potentially inundate the CN article with trivia, though it disappoints me that this isn't clarified anywhere in the article as it could mislead readers. CP's coverage of accidents seems to be woven into the history section, which is also a reasonable editorial choice for that article in of itself. I've also noticed some articles on individual rail lines (as well as tunnels and bridges) do have coverage of derailments, but as coverage of rail lines in Canada is depressingly poor and inconsistent, we obviously can't rely on this. What I would like to see is for this article to play an infrastructural role in expanding our coverage of Canadian rail accidents, allowing us in the future to "spin off" potential articles such as List of accidents involving the Canadian Pacific Railway, which would help to streamline those already-large main articles and avoid them becoming cluttered with both older and less significant events. In my opinion these would be some of the most useful lists to have, but currently we suffer from a chicken-and-egg effect which I hope this article can hope to resolve by acting as a "master list". At least for now, I would err on the side of inclusion, but with an eye (and ideally discussion) on whether or not large groups of less-significant events could be spun off into more specific list articles, or if we might be best off in the end going for a decade-by-decade structure similar to the global list. Either would be relatively easy to implement after the fact and the former would also help to better connect the rail accident list "ecosystem" with articles on lines and companies. Julius177 (talk) 19:26, 22 April 2021 (UTC)

@Julius177: Your highlighting the issue of duplication is important, because this is an ongoing problem across Wikipedia articles generally. I've found later suggestions to resolve such problems can be blocked by vested interests. For 1991 onward, the online TSB railway accident reports (https://www.bst-tsb.gc.ca/eng/rapports-reports/rail/index.html) provide a good source. Perhaps, being sufficiently notable to warrant a TSB report might be a minimum standard. However, there are 432 reports in this list alone. To avoid clutter, should an attempt be made to cull the number down before initial inclusion? Prior to 1991, I have no idea how to source a complete TSB listing. Out of curiosity, I sent them an email, but from past experience with federal agencies, I'm not expecting a useful response. Finding accidents in the pre-TSB era could be even more challenging. DMBanks1 (talk) 21:56, 22 April 2021 (UTC)

A interesting 1907 one not mentioned in other wiki. https://open.library.ubc.ca/collections/bcnewspapers/xphoenix/items/1.0185488#p0z-1r0f:%22flying%20train%22 DMBanks1 (talk) 15:25, 23 April 2021 (UTC)

Nowadays, an accident resulting in the deaths of two or more train crew receives national media coverage, but over a 100 years ago, such events were common, so any media coverage was only local. In which case, would a list include certain events today, but exclude similar events occurring in the distant past? In fact, some TSB reports of recent decades cover events which would have warranted only limited coverage in a local newspaper in the early 1900s. DMBanks1 (talk) 16:34, 23 April 2021 (UTC)

I think we have to go with what coverage is available, unfortunately, as that guides notability for us. I agree that it does lend itself to a certain inconsistency. I think our priority should be incidents we can easily find reliable sources for, and then deal with more questionable or edge cases as we need to. Julius177 (talk) 00:32, 4 May 2021 (UTC)

Canadian disaster database

@DMBanks1: it seems there is a national disaster database which includes most 20th century rail accidents of significance: here. The criteria are set to exclude most relatively minor incidents, so it could help us in moving toward a standard. Julius177 (talk) 10:51, 28 June 2021 (UTC)

@Julius177: I'm currently reading 'Wreck, Canada's Worst Railway Accidents' (1997), which provides the stories on the 30 worst up till then. Lac-Mégantic is the only comparable one since then. I am aware of a couple of additional earlier ones that were really bad. Unless you have an objection, I will split the list into two tables. The first will be 'Worst Railway Accidents' and the second 'Other Major Railway Accidents' into which contributors can add entries at least on par with those listed. Based on my general knowledge of BC accidents, similar BC ones alone to date could number into the hundreds. The reason for a split is to enable readers to easily identify the worst accidents from among a potential list of thousands. DMBanks1 (talk) 22:58, 25 September 2022 (UTC)