TrainDad

Jonathan is not yet 3 years old. The rail­roads think he might be a terrorist.

Okay, that’s a lit­tle strong: they think I might be a ter­ror­ist, and I’m using him as “cover.” Sev­eral times we’ve been at a train sta­tion, out­side a yard, or at a road cross­ing and rail­road police have watched us closely. A few times they’ve come up and talked to us; always with kind, gen­tle con­ver­sa­tion, but nonethe­less prob­ing, try­ing to fig­ure out if we’re as inno­cent as we look.

Read­ing around, I find that we’ve had it much eas­ier than some. “Rail­fans” with­out kids are given more scrutiny, and those who make a hobby of pho­tograph­ing trains are given the most scrutiny of all. There are many in that last cat­e­gory; just con­sider rail­fan web­sites with 700,000 pho­tos or 168,000 pho­tos. Some of those pho­tog­ra­phers have seen it cross from scrutiny to “harrassment.”

The pho­tog­ra­phers have often won­dered why it isn’t obvi­ous that they are inno­cent rail fans; I’ve won­dered why it isn’t obvi­ous that I’m with Jonathan, and he loves trains, and we’re just out for an inno­cent bit of train-watching. I decided to see if I could find out what was behind it, and I found answers.

Con­sider:

• Rail attacks are more numer­ous and deadly than those on air­ports and airplanes.
• Rail ter­ror­ism is so easy, you can find how-to instruc­tions on YouTube.
• A typ­i­cal tank car can hold 90,000 gal­lons of chlo­rine; if released, esti­mates say the lethal cloud would drift from 5 to 15 miles, depend­ing on atmos­pheric con­di­tions. In a pop­u­lated city, this would mean a death toll rang­ing from a few hun­dred to a million.
• Access to tank cars is so easy that 13-year-olds can cre­ate graf­fiti mas­ter­pieces on them. More seri­ously, a reporter walked into 48 chem­i­cal plant rail­road yards and found free access to cars with toxic chem­i­cals in each of them.

I’ll make it sim­ple: rail­roads carry weapons of mass destruc­tion and leave them acces­si­ble to 13-year-olds.

This is the inher­ent form of rail­roads; it is not pos­si­ble to elim­i­nate access. Not pos­si­ble — look at the argu­ment over secur­ing the U.S.–Mexico bor­der. That bor­der is only 1951 miles long; but Amer­i­can rail­roads oper­ate on 120,000 miles of active track, not includ­ing yards, sid­ings, or even par­al­lel track. To deal with real­ity, we must accept that rail­road secu­rity can­not hap­pen by elim­i­nat­ing access. Secu­rity must be formed through other methods.

Top on the list of other secu­rity meth­ods is iden­ti­fy­ing what a threat looks like, and watch­ing for it. The graf­fiti artist couldn’t fig­ure out how to release the con­tents of his “can­vas” if he wanted to; he’s not a sig­nif­i­cant threat. Unfor­tu­nately, the world has seen enough ter­ror­ism that we have a long list of real threat char­ac­ter­is­tics to watch for. High on that list, for exam­ple, is pho­tog­ra­phy. Pho­to­graphic recon­nais­sance is one of the first steps of almost every suc­cess­ful ter­ror­ist attack on infra­struc­ture. Pho­tographs can be used for devel­op­ment of 3D mod­els and for deter­min­ing GPS coor­di­nates, which can in turn be used for train­ing attack­ers. As it hap­pens, rail­fans love pho­tograph­ing vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties: most pic­tures are taken at road cross­ings, bridges, or other points of weak­ness. I find it hard to fault the rail­roads for being sen­si­tive in this area.

What pho­tog­ra­phers seem to find fault with, how­ever, is not so much the secu­rity against them as it is the lack of appar­ent secu­rity in other areas. Yet that can be deceiv­ing. In my “real job” I’ve done a tiny bit of work on a few security-related projects, and even in these small-time sit­u­a­tions the peo­ple involved don’t want their secu­rity mea­sures to be obvi­ous. I’ve helped find ways to hide video cam­eras, license-plate cam­eras, laser prox­im­ity sen­sors and infrared detec­tors. If secu­rity mea­sures are obvi­ous, then they are known — and when known, they can be avoided. In real­ity the rail­road secu­rity mea­sures imple­mented since 2001 have been extensive.

One way to mea­sure the lev­els of “hid­den” secu­rity is by check­ing the reviews of those with access to the infor­ma­tion. Greg Feith, a for­mer acci­dent inves­ti­ga­tor for the NTSB, has said that the avi­a­tion indus­try should “take a les­son” from the rail indus­try secu­rity imple­men­ta­tion. In 2003, the Amer­i­can Asso­ci­a­tion of Rail­roads received the 2003 James S. Cogswell Award for Indus­trial Secu­rity; of 11,000 eli­gi­ble orga­ni­za­tions, only 15 awards were given.

We can also look at the for­mal secu­rity struc­ture at a higher level for clues to how seri­ous they are about secu­rity at a lower level. Here we find things such as a DOD-certified Oper­a­tions Cen­ter mon­i­tor­ing and eval­u­at­ing secret intel­li­gence on poten­tial threats; the Rail­way Alert Net­work (RAN), for rapid com­mu­ni­ca­tion through­out the indus­try; and ST-ISAC, the Sur­face Trans­porta­tion Infor­ma­tion Shar­ing and Analy­sis Cen­ter, oper­at­ing with the gov­ern­ment at the Top Secret level to col­lect, ana­lyze, and dis­sem­i­nate infor­ma­tion on threats.

There is also strong finan­cial incen­tive for the rail­roads to focus on sig­nif­i­cant secu­rity mea­sures. For exam­ple, the Union Pacific freight load con­sists of very roughly 5% dan­ger­ous chem­i­cals, but 50% of their insur­ance costs are just cov­er­ing those loads. A sin­gle inci­dent could effec­tively destroy a com­pany, financially.

Look­ing at the indus­try from this per­spec­tive, I find no fault with a rail­road police­man ask­ing me a few questions.

Make your life eas­ier, and the lives of numer­ous oth­ers, by fol­low­ing a few sim­ple rules. Don’t tres­pass; stay behind fences; kindly and quickly relo­cate when asked. Keep your dis­tance and don’t give cause for alarm.

It’s not much to ask from an indus­try that gives so much to us.