I've been working on the railroad

All the live long day.  Well, not really, at least not in 1:1 scale.   You might have noticed the number of train wrecks involving tank cars of crude oil, resulting in massive fires, death, and property damage.  How come so many?  Well, the crude oil wrecks have been increasing because a lot more crude is going by rail because US and Canadian oil production is ramping up and Obama is sitting on the Keystone XL pipeline.  
  Some accident are just plain gross negligence.  The bad accident in Quebec happened because the single crewman on the train pulled it into a siding and failed to set the hand brakes before going off to a motel to catch some crew rest. It was winter, and nobody ever shuts down a diesel in winter, lest it never start again.  So the train, nobody aboard, engine left running, and no brakes set, rolled slowly off the siding, gathered speed on the downgrade, headed into town, derailed and caught fire.  I forget how many people got killed in that one.  Burned down every building in town that one did.
  But a lot of accidents come from old worn track that derails the passing train.  Down at White River Junction, on a line used by Amtrak's Montrealer, the wooden ties are so rotten I can pick spikes out of the ties with just my fingers.  That bit of track has a slow order (35 mph) on it, but I used to worry as I packed youngest son onto the train for the seven hour crawl down to college in New York City.
  Betcha there is plenty more track like that carrying unit trains of crude oil.  It's only a matter of time before another one derails.
  What to do?  The railroad insurance companies ought to bear down on the railroads with higher premiums on every mile of substandard track.  That might work, if railroad companies actually depend upon insurance for liability protection.  They may not, many railroads are large enough to self insure.  
   In that case we have work for the million lawyers hanging around suing drug companies and chasing ambulances.  They ought to get with it, and organize a suit against the railroad every time a train derails.  For plaintiffs you have the union railroad workers endangered in the accident, the landowners endangered by petroleum fires, the fish and game departments enraged by water pollution.  It shouldn't be hard to arrange for sympathetic press coverage.
   Along these lines, there ought to be nationally recognized written standard for acceptable track.  Something a plaintiff's lawyer can wave in front of a jury, and quote chapter and verse about how the track at the accident site did not meet standard.  We need something with the kind of authority that Underwriter's Labs carries. 
   Next time someone cries for more infrastructure spending, suggest that some accident prone track get relaid.  Best of all, track maintenance is a private sector job.  If the courts make derailments expensive enough, the railroads will get the message and spend the money to replace over age track.