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1 Introduction to railroad security
It’s 9 p.m. on a long summer evening at an obscure railroad location in the middle of California’s Mojave Desert – ironically named West Siberia in this burning desert that never sees snow or frost. Population: zero – as is the case for its neighboring railroad control points, East Siberia and Ash Hill. As the sky darkens, an eastbound intermodal train drifts downgrade and comes to a stop at the cantilever signal bridge. A van approaches on old Route 66, the two-lane road that parallels the Los Angeles–Chicago mainline of the Burlington Northern Santa Fe (BNSF), one of the busiest stretches of railroad in the U.S. with upwards of 100 trains passing each 24 hours. There are many crews on this stretch of desolate railroad – too many for everyone to know one another well. The crew from the eastbound climb down from the cab and prepare to hand the train over to the crew arriving in the van. There were lots of delays today getting out of the Port of Los Angeles–Long Beach and up Cajon Pass, and then a logjam at the big yard at Barstow, some 75 miles or so to the east, so the crew has run out of time to make it to the crew change point at Needles, another 75 miles to the east. The crewmembers exchange quick greetings, and the new crew is soon off. Just another day on America’s busiest and arguably most important rail line.
Three time zones east and six hours later, a neatly dressed young man in his twenties waits to board a commuter train outside Philadelphia. Like many of the other daily commuters, he carries a worn leather briefcase and holds a morning paper in his free hand. The 6:05 to Suburban Station in downtown Philadelphia is on time, and the passengers quickly board as the train scurries through the awakening suburbs to its downtown destination. At the next-to-last suburban stop, the young man picks up his paper and quietly exits the car, leaving his briefcase behind.
Meanwhile, as another sunny late summer day warms the cornfields of southern Minnesota, a lone trespasser wanders down the tracks of the unfenced and unguarded yard of the Dakota, Minnesota and Eastern at Waseca. It’s a busy time for agricultural traffic in the Midwest, and the yard is crowded with cars loaded with this year’s grain harvest. Climbing furtively atop one of the covered hopper cars, he looks around to see if he is noticed, but sees no one in any direction, and pulls out a can of spray paint.
At about the same time, a TSA surface inspector in Houston is conducting a chain of custody inspection of toxic inhalation hazard material (TIH) located in a Port Terminal Railroad Association (PTRA) rail yard. The inspector notes that there is a discrepancy between the TIH rail cars physically observed in the rail yard and those reported in the yard-list paperwork for TIH rail cars present. Eighteen TIH rail cars were counted, but the yardmaster had 19 TIH rail cars on his yard-list documentation.
Is this a regular day of railroading, or are these settings for catastrophic events? The scenarios noted above are suggestive of the immense task of securing America’s railroads against manmade and natural disasters. In each of the four cases, things may be simply normal – the crewmembers on the BNSF train in the desert are in fact the rightful employees. The young man has simply forgotten his briefcase. The chemical cars have not been tampered with during their stay at the plant. The trespasser is there to spray paint his signature on the grain car, not to contaminate its contents. And the TSA inspector found that, according to the yardmaster, the “missing” TIH rail car had just departed the rail yard and the paperwork has not “caught up”. But all these situations also have the potential to be catastrophic events with immediate and long-term consequences. Imagine the opposite results. The crewmembers boarding the train are in fact part of a domestic terrorist group intent on disrupting American life. They have trained to know the protocols of operating the train and, once started, plant a bomb and jump off the moving train as it glides down the grade to the little crossroads community of Amboy. By the time the bomb explodes, the train is moving at speeds upward of 100 miles per hour and devastates the community, killing a carload of Marines returning from a weekend in Las Vegas to the nearby base at 29 Palms.
The erstwhile commuter is in fact a newly recruited member of an international terrorist organization. Not a suicide bomber – he can live to fight another day, as the commuter train is an easy target, with no security lines to board and minimal attention to someone leaving his briefcase behind. A briefcase loaded either with explosives or anthrax powder, in either event a disaster of great proportions, awaits as the train continues its otherwise unremarkable inbound trip to the metropolis.
The trespasser is no typical graffiti artist but in fact a disgruntled former employee of the big grain company whose privately-owned hopper car he has boarded. The spray paint can is a neat way of concealing his real motive – to contaminate the load of grain with a highly toxic poison. From his former work at the grain elevator, he is familiar with rail cars and how to gain access to the contents inside. His work done, he watches as the train is assembled and moves east along with 100 similar loaded hoppers.
What if the yardmaster could not confirm that the TIH rail car had departed the yard? Where was the TIH rail car? Had it been delivered? Had its markings been changed? Had it departed undocumented? If any of the latter, what was the intent of “hiding” a TIH rail car in the country’s fourth-largest and densely populated city?
A third way of looking at the examples is to focus on what may have been done to avert the four catastrophes. In the first case, a background search of BNSF crew members discloses a possible link between a militia group and a driver of one of the vans used to transport crews to various re-crewing destinations. Information shared between the FBI, DHS, and the BNSF police indicate an increased level of communication between the suspect and a group on the terrorist watch list. The railroad police notify the California Highway Patrol, and both are in place and apprehend the bogus crew as they prepare to board the train.
As the commuter train leaves the station, one of the passengers notices that the young man in the briefcase scenario is acting suspiciously, looking nervously around and repeatedly opening and closing the case and moving it quickly away from another passenger standing close-by on the platform. Without drawing the attention of the man, he notifies the local police from his cell phone, who in turn notifies the head of security for Philadelphia’s 30th Street Station, activating a well-rehearsed response by a network of police and first responders. As the man leaves the train, he is quickly brought under custody as a team hurries into the car to retrieve the case and deliver it to the waiting bomb squad.
In the Houston rail yard and through interviewing yard workers, it was learned that the missing TIH rail car had just departed on a train. The train designation and route was known, but the TIH rail car in question was not on the train’s manifest. The TSA inspector immediately notified the railroad police, who, in turn, alerted the local police along the route, as well as appropriate government agencies at all levels. Fortunately, the train was stopped at an interlocking not too far from the rail yard and the TIH-carrying rail car was secured. After a brief investigation, it was learned that the conductor on the train was sympathetic to a local gang with Central American ties and intended to release the TIH in an adjacent neighborhood.
The third case, however, is more troublesome. Out in America’s heartland, things are open and accessible, and little thought has been given to rail cargo as a way of settling a personal grudge against a former employer. Unless the individual has acted out his anger beforehand, the contaminated cargo is likely to remain undetected, and its effects difficult to trace back to the offender. And in the fourth case, DHS and the FBI have learned that gangs have been recruited by terrorist groups to assist in transporting weapons and people and to support their ideology – for a price.
The purpose of these examples is to point out the immense task facing the network of organizations and individuals charged with securing the nation’s rail system against catastrophic events. The U.S. rail system is huge, complicated, and intertwined with other modes of transportation and critical industries. Its infrastructure includes not only track and rolling stock but bridges, tunnels, overpasses, stations, signals and communications systems, and maintenance of way facilities. Its tracks extend through major urban and populated areas, and into chemical plants, grain elevators, port facilities, and factories; its rights-of-way often parallel mass transit systems and heavily traveled highways; share stations with buses, trolleys, and subway trains; and run near places of iconic value, water supplies and large public sporting venues.
The potential for disaster is also clearly real. Looking at terrorism globally, one is struck by how often a train is the target. Mumbai, Moscow, Madrid, London – time and again terrorists have seen passenger rail as an attractive and relatively vulnerable target. The goal may be killing innocent passengers, disrupting the economic and social life of major cities, and crippling the efficient operations of the passenger and freight rail systems – pointing out the inability of governments to protect their citizens. Freight rail does not appear to be as much of a target as passenger rail. But, and as a former TSA intelligence officer stated, the threat to freight rail and, in particular, hazmat trains is “low threat but not a no threat.”
It is useful at this point to define terrorism and terrorist. Jessica Stern (1999, p.11) defined terrorism in this manner:
Two characteristics are critical for distinguishing terrorism from other forms of violence. First, terrorism is aimed at noncombatants. This is what makes it different from fighting in war. Second, terrorists use violence for dramatic purpose: usually to instill fear in the targeted population. This deliberate evocation of dread is what sets terrorism apart from simple murder or assault.
What Stern’s definition clarifies is the basic lesson of the New Normalcy: that it is the acts and the motivations of groups, not the nature of the groups involved, that is most important to understand. Terrorists can be domestic or foreign, working singly or as part of an organized conspiracy, motivated by idealism or hatred, rational or irrational in their goals.
Why do terrorists attack rail targets? Clearly it fits the description of terrorism provided by Stern: it is a way of attacking civilians, it adversely affects the economy, and it is guaranteed to instill fear and demonstrate dramatically the risks involved in riding passenger trains, or being in a crowded station, or even being in a community suddenly contaminated by a hazardous waste spill or chemical release from a derailed or sabotaged freight train.
As tragic and frustrating as attacks on passenger rail have and presumably will continue to be, attacking the freight operations of the sprawling U.S. rail system may be even more chilling in its potential for catastrophe. Freight trains in the U.S. are the preferred mode for the movement of hazardous materials, to include poison and toxic inhalation hazard (P/TIH) material. In recent years the movement of highly volatile crude oil from the Bakken oilfields in the northern plains has increased the threat from catastrophic events involving tank cars. Railroads move increasing amounts of intermodal freight into the nation’s ports and bound for destinations inside the country. Rail operations may be the intended target or simply the means of moving a dirty bomb or a vial of anthrax from one point to another. A serious attack on rail freight, especially if it is perpetrated on an intermodal train, has the potential to wreak enormous economic damage, potentially closing off port traffic for a period of time with economic consequences in the billions of lost dollars for the U.S. economy.
Adding to the potential for disaster is the lack of examples to provide an empirical basis for programs to secure the nation’s rail system. As a result, policymakers and first responders are left to deal with the most-wicked category of potential risk: low-probability, high-impact events. An alternative is to study events in other national settings, but these run afoul of the consideration that the systems are often fundamentally different as are the organizations and individuals committing acts of violence. Modeling catastrophic events and planning for response and recovery are vital but must remain somewhat removed from a real sense of the probability of rail as a target for terrorist activity. Much can be learned from examining the impact on the rail system of non-terrorist catastrophic events, caused by human error or negligence or by natural disasters, but these inform us more about response and recovery than the critical variable, prevention.
The common element in all these projections is uncertainty – about targets, about possible perpetrators, about timing, about single or coordinated attacks. With high levels of uncertainty comes the need for careful analysis of risk. A recent report of the National Research Council’s Committee to Review the Department of Homeland Security’s Approach to Risk Analysis notes that “although risk analysis is just one input to decision making, it is an essential one” (National Research Council 2010, p. 1), adding that “proper recognition and characterization of both variability and uncertainty are important in all elements of a risk analysis, including effective interpretation of data as they are collected over time on threats, vulnerabilities, consequences, intelligence, and event occurrence” (p. 3).
Risk assessment is still a field of analysis seeking answers to its most pressing questions: how to inform decision makers when empirical data is limited or not directly related to the situation under review; how to coordinate both the analysis and the interpretation of risk assessments among a variety of organizations, public and private, national and local, involved in potentially threatened operations; and how to inform a variety of decisions and decision makers, from high-level policy makers and strategists to those with boots on the ground as first responders (National Research Council 2010).
Approaches to rail security
A little-known event during World War II points out how much has changed in regard to threats to the rail system in the past half-century. On a June evening in 1943, a squad of four German-Americans were landed by a German U-boat at Amagansett, Long Island, with orders to sabotage major elements of the U.S. rail infrastructure. Their targets included the huge Limeville Bridge over the Ohio River on the Chesapeake & Ohio, a critical point on a major rail route for Appalachian coal to fuel the factories of the Midwest, and possibly the famous Horseshoe Curve on the Pennsylvania Railroad, at that time one of the busiest if not the most busy spot on the American rail map. An observant coast guardsman, John C. Cullen, apprehended...
