Freight Rail Emergency Response Support for Hazardous Materials;
- The AskRail mobile application serves emergency responders who arrive first to the scene of a rail emergency and need critical information about the contents of a railcar.
- AskRailprovides immediate access to accurate, real-time data about individual railcars on a train. This data can help emergency responders make informed decisions about how to respond to the scene of a rail emergency.
- AskRail uses a simple railcar ID – equipment ID is a set of letters and numbers on the side of every freight car. It also allows the view of the contents of the entire train and access to reference resources to assist incident responses.
- The information of the contents of every freight car in North America is housed in a data base maintained by the American Association of Railroads (AAR); USA Homeland Security has allowed the access to this information to Emergency Responders through the Ask Rail app.
- Access to the app is granted “to qualified users and emergency responders who have completed rail emergency training sponsored by one of the Class I freight railroads or at the Security and Emergency Response Training Center.”
- To date Canadian pacific Railway has provided training for over 20,000 Emergency Responders at the Security and Emergency Response Training Center (SERTC) in Pueblo, Colorado.
- Information on acquiring the app is available on both the Canadian Pacific Railway (CP) and Canadian National Railway(CN) web sites.
CP – www.cpr.ca/en/safety/transporting-dangerous-goods/askrail