Dear Readers,

Am I missing something?

Since the terrible railroad accident in Quebec, just north of the Maine state line, it seems our nation has suddenly discovered that trains carry dangerous cargo.

As a consequence, we have been peppered with news stories and opinion columns that seem to focus on the dangers of transporting crude oil, especially the crude pumped from tar sands, although the crude involved in the recent tragic accident was North Dakota light crude.

Some stories focus on the railroads themselves and the dangers they pose to our environment.

As an aside, some stories mention how pipelines are a lot safer way to transport oil, but some of the stories always have the word “but” and continue to explain that there have been pipeline leaks and those are dangerous, too.

Despite the accident and the outcry over its possible repercussions, our trains, pipelines, ships and trucks carry tons and tons of dangerous cargo to and across our land every day.

This week, transportation experts from Canada and the United States are trying to figure out how a parked freight train with 70 loaded tank cars and five engines somehow rolled down a grade and smashed into a town. They wonder why it caught fire and turned a sleepy village into a war zone.

If you stop to think about it for a moment, little towns like Boothbay, Wiscasset, Dresden and Damariscotta are not immune from these dangers.

Most every day, you can see tank trucks filled with gasoline on our streets. If you think railroad tanker cars are dangerous, wait until we have an accident involving a gasoline tanker truck, perish the thought.

The answer, according to some of our opinion writers and big thinkers, is to move our economy away from energy fueled by oil products.

Well and good. Great idea. But I fear that won’t happen in my lifetime and may not happen in yours.

However, we are making progress.

Today’s cars now get a lot better gas mileage than the huge finned monsters we used to drive.

We see hybrid cars on our roads that get 50-plus miles per gallon. Major and minor car companies are now making electric cars, too, and they provide an average mpg that is out of sight.

This means our nation is using less gasoline, much to the despair of some oil-rich nations that don’t like us very much.

Although we would like to wean our nation off its current diet of oil, alternative technology is just not there yet. If it were, wouldn’t you think all the major energy companies would embrace it?

Researchers are working to find other ways to power our economy; but, so far, no one has come up with a magic solution that would instantly solve all our energy needs.

But we can do some things to make our present technology better and safer, and we have.

In our cars, new seat belts and air bags have saved countless lives. Tires that used to wear out in a season now last tens of thousands of miles. Anti-lock brakes can keep a wintertime trip to the store from becoming an adventure.

As for our railroads, they seem to be making a comeback, in part because they pared down some costs by cutting the size of train crews. But I wonder if they have gone too far.

One thing we have learned about the awful Quebec crash is that there was just one man assigned to run that train. He had parked the train and there was no one watching it when it escaped. That, in the words of one transportation expert, “is just nuts.”

It seems to me it would be a lot safer to have more than one crewman running a huge train made up of five engines and 70 tank cars filled with crude oil.

In my mind, the cost of just one more crew member on a train of that size would be peanuts compared to the possible payout after a major accident.

After all, although one pilot can fly an airliner, they always have a co-pilot on board.

Is there a message there for the railroads?