AIFoPa-2026-0027 — A Hundred and Forty-Six Cars

Connell, Washington has about five thousand one hundred people. It sits thirty-five miles north of Pasco. It was established in 1883 as a stop on the railway. It is sustained by food processing, agricultural chemicals and the state corrections system.

On 16 June 2026 a train was lined onto a section of track near Connell. A roadway maintenance worker was on that track. The train was nine thousand four hundred feet long. It weighed six thousand five hundred tons. It ran to a hundred and forty-six cars.

At least twenty of those cars carried hazardous materials. Twenty is the threshold at which the rules oblige a railroad to call a train a key train. What the materials were has not been established publicly. Brandon Pettit is vice general chairman of the signalmen’s BNSF general committee. He says only that it could have been any of the substances that pass through the Pasco classification yard.

The instrument that lined it is called Movement Planner. Wabtec supplies it to BNSF. It is a set of algorithms that plan train movements and then line the switches and signals to execute those plans. It does this across most of the BNSF system without prior authorisation from a dispatcher.

The signalmen say it bypassed the safety restrictions. It lined the hazardous train northbound out of Pasco onto occupied track. A human dispatcher saw what had happened. He took the signal down before the train could be ushered onto it.

The Brotherhood of Railroad Signalmen wrote to the Federal Railroad Administration on Wednesday 26 August. What had been prevented would otherwise have been a “public catastrophe”. They meant for the worker, for the crew on the train, and for the community of north Franklin County.

BNSF describes the same minute differently. A dispatcher, the company says, manually entered an instruction to line a switch “milliseconds” after the software executed the same queued instruction. A track authority is the permission stating who may occupy a stretch of line. The switch was then lined inconsistently with the one the dispatcher had granted.

The company says this is what its layers are for. “Like all railroads, BNSF relies upon overlapping layers of measures that include engineered solutions, operating rules, and training to prevent incidents from occurring. That approach worked in this instance as the dispatcher immediately and correctly resolved the issue.”

BNSF adds that there has never been a train accident on its network caused by a defect or failure of its computer-aided dispatching systems.

Mr Pettit’s reply to that is the crux of the file. No accident has been attributed to the system, he says, because on each occasion a person corrected it.

The two accounts agree on what the switch did. They differ on whose hand was nearest it. On either account, the instruction the software executed was one the software had queued. A machine and a person can issue the same instruction milliseconds apart and produce an inconsistent result. That is the finding.

The signalmen put it in the language of the trade. The system, they say, does not comply with the fail-safe closed-loop principle. That principle is the rule that a system must verify a commanded change actually took effect. On that basis it is in breach of federal regulation as it stands. “What we’re asking,” Mr Pettit said, “is that they don’t turn this system back on, period.”

It had been turned back on once already. BNSF took Movement Planner offline shortly after the June incident. It reactivated the system some weeks later on the Pasco–Spokane corridor. The company stopped using it again this month. The Federal Railroad Administration had asked for a shutdown, and the American Train Dispatchers Association had requested one.

Mr Ed Dowell is president of that association. He called the incident a wake-up call. His organisation has told the regulator that BNSF knew of the vulnerability for about a year before Connell. Wabtec had estimated the fixes would take some fourteen months.

“If defects capable of producing this type of failure are known but remain in service,” Mr Dowell said, “that raises serious questions about risk management and regulatory oversight.”

Two similar mishaps occurred with the dispatching system in 2022. Both were also in Washington state. The signalmen tried on both occasions to have the Federal Railroad Administration look into them. They were unable to preserve the system logs.

The Bureau ordinarily has the advantage of wreckage. An incident that has completed itself leaves a figure attached to it. The derailment at East Palestine, Ohio, in February 2023 involved twenty cars of vinyl chloride and other hazardous materials. The cleanup cost eight hundred million dollars. A figure is a thing a record can be built around.

This file has no figure. It has a signal that was displayed for a short time and then was not. It has a worker who has no idea, presumably to this day, of the afternoon he had.

The cheapest incidents to ignore are the ones that were stopped. The railroads are lobbying for regulatory changes that would let them replace human employees with systems of this kind. The signalmen’s letter makes the arithmetic explicit. The artificial intelligence made the potentially catastrophic error. An experienced human employee identified and prevented it.