Derailed: Performative Nihilism and Critical Infrastructure Attacks On The Railroads

Photo by User Slambo on en.wikipedia (same as Slambo here), CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

The tracks of the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railroad Hi-Line stretch like an interminable metal spine into the miasmic darkness across the rural Pacific Northwest. Most days, the only glimmer of civilization comes via a 100-car freight train or the meandering silver gleam of Amtrak’s passenger liners. On a chilly late November evening, two shadowy figures tread lightly across the pale glint of small rocks used as rail ballast and stop a stone’s throw from the traffic crossing gates at milepost 100.319. Dropping to their knees, one of the mysterious interlopers reaches inside a brown paper bag. They don thick rubber gloves, pull out a drill, and a mysterious assembly of wire, C-clamps, magnets, and a tiny microcontroller. Glancing quickly to make sure they’re alone, they bury part of their strange device using the ballast as subterfuge, carefully attaching the clamps to each siderail with clamp and adhesive. The device is turned on, and the pair smile at each other. Sweaty, exhausted, but ultimately victorious.

Tonight is merely the latest in a string of forty one victories. So far, their plan has been successful. Only this time, they won’t be so lucky.

Someone is watching.

At 11:41 pm, a mysterious message appears on a control screen. Seconds later, the message vanishes into the ether.

Two words: “Track Indication”.

A “track indication” is the electronic signal that means the track is obstructed, usually by a train. However, there are no trains scheduled for this track at 11:41 pm. Something other than a train tripped that signal, and the Deputy Chief of Railway Police sees the location coordinates for the alert: Milepost 100.4. The identical geolocation as the two trespassers in black. They tell the sheriff’s deputy who arrives on scene that they’re looking for lost keys. On an unlit section of track, with no phone or flashlight to search in the darkness, wearing dark clothing, at a rail crossing where they could easily be struck by a train or passenger vehicle. Why do they seem so unconcerned with the possibility of getting hit by a freight train?

They already know the train isn’t coming. Because they sent the “Track Indication” signal to the central train management and dispatch facility hundreds of miles away. A signal that wasn’t coming from a train.

Class 1 rails are made from two parallel “I” beams made from high grade carbon processed steel, laid down by heavy machinery over piles of small rocks (known as ballast) in ¼ mile long pre-welded segments, commonly referred to as blocks, energized by the track laying machine, which sends low-voltage current traveling through the steel rails, attached to rail plates, and fastened to the ground using rail ties and spikes. The spaces in between the rail blocks use insulated copper or steel wire block joints to form what is called a track circuit, and there are signals at each end of the block to control the movement of the train.

Track circuits work by running a circuit using the rails to connect a power source at one end of the block with a relay at the far end. The relay and power source are connected to each rail by cables. If the circuit is complete, low voltage power flows down one rail, through a relay, and returns to the power source via the other rail. If the circuit is complete, the relay will be energized, which keeps signals in the “clear” position. If the circuit is broken, the system fails in a safe manner. A broken rail or a railway shunt causes the relay to become de-energized, and prevents any other train from approaching that block, because the fail-safe assumes the track circuit is already occupied-even if the track is clear.

Railway shunts, at their most basic, are wire stretched between and connected to the rails of a train track. Functionally, shunts mimic the electrical signal emitted by a train on the tracks. This signal prevents other trains from entering the track circuit until the shunt has been located and removed. Depending on the location, the shunt can interfere with the proper operation of crossing gates at railroad/traffic intersections. If the gates malfunction and allow vehicular traffic across the tracks, it could send that vehicle directly into the path of an oncoming train at full speed. Shunts can also interfere with a rail speed and collision prevention system called Positive Train Control, triggering the abrupt deployment of the train’s air brake system.

Two climate activists built more than forty rail shunts that block train signals, placed them on miles of BNSF track, in three separate counties in Washington State, over a period of eleven months before getting caught by the local sheriff and train inspectors. They targeted trains carrying HAZMAT loads along the BNSF Hi-Line, within 30 miles of the Canadian border, before it arrived at the final American destination and transferred over to the rail in British Columbia. They allegedly did so to show solidarity with a First Nation tribe in British Columbia, who have spent years fighting the installation of an oil pipeline on unceded tribal territory. And the most galling part of this entire story is that their fellow anarcho-communists are intent on insisting that 41 prolonged, premeditated, and cavalier acts of train sabotage were completely harmless and noble. These days, all the cool kids commit eco-terrorism. Even The New Yorker celebrates performative nihilism and critical infrastructure attacks now.

Signal interference is a dangerously stupid game. Signals are the central nervous system of the railroad. Signals are used as nouns and verbs, they can mean a physical object, or an electronic one. They tell conductors and engineers when to approach, when to slow down or stop, when they’re approaching a curve, when to switch from a siding onto the main track, where they’re heading, where the line terminates. They serve as eyes when a conductor doesn’t have line of sight, they trigger klaxons, horns, and whistles so others in the path of a train can get out of harm’s way.

Imagine a freight train carrying 100 cars worth of hazardous materials coal, crude oil, anhydrous ammonia, molten sulphur, chlorine gas, phosphorous, or thousands of pounds of high explosives. They might not be environmentally friendly, but they get refined, processed, diluted, or compressed into things we use every day.

A fully loaded 100 car, 268,000-pound freight train traveling 50 mph needs just over two miles to gradually come to a full stop on a straight track. Now imagine that train on a blind curve going downhill towards a bridge or embankment.

Freight trains don’t stop on a dime. Once they’re at maximum allowable speed, anything in their way will be a pancake in very short order. Think of them as a 135-ton set of dynamically connected mega missiles that destroy anything on the track, including the track itself. When rail ties buckle, the connections between the rail cars decouple, forcing the straight line of cars into a serpentine one, while the train starts shaking hard enough to register on a seismograph. Decelerating from the chain reaction of the impact, the locomotive in front jumps the track first, momentum shoving it nose first into the guardrail of the embankment. The cars just behind the locomotive get swung like a fishtail and skid off the embankment, several do a full 360-degree rotation as they hit the road below, crumpling like sheets of aluminum foil.

The cars containing anhydrous ammonia and chlorine gas are the ones that absorb the strongest impact. Rips in the metal allow massive levels of deadly gases to silently spew into the sky. The crude oil cars have cracks and the oil vapors inside them ignite fireballs. The thick, sludgy oil has seeped into the ground, the body of water nearby, and covers the road in black slime. And waiting to explode, like it’s starring in a Michael Bay movie, is the incendiary beast known as white phosphorus, that melts bridges as easily as it melts skin and bone. The engineer and conductor are badly injured and hallucinating hypoxia induced purple Freon spiders as they await their final minutes.

Thanks to the signal failure and resulting crash, multiple toxic chemicals are saturating entire city blocks, torturing every living soul in its caustic path. Their skin and eyes and lungs sear, blister, shut down. Ambulances are stuck because the crossing gates at the crossing still think there’s a train on the tracks, and they must risk their lives and vehicle to get through, not knowing if they’re making the disaster worse.

Birds drop out of the sky. Plants turn a sickly yellow brown. The water is so toxic that dead fish float to the surface. It ruins the beautiful lands that the indigenous tribes have fought tooth and nail to preserve and protect from 3 predatory corporations intent on stripping the land of its resources.

Only this time, it’s not Big Business or Big Government that does the damage. It’s perpetuated by confused and relatively privileged white kids who cosplay as anarchist warriors and don’t understand that their lack of self-awareness and fundamental misunderstanding of history, physics, public safety, and basic common sense just made life infinitely more dangerous for the indigenous tribes who are now sitting ducks for retaliatory abuse by the government, even if they had nothing to do with the sabotage of critical infrastructure.

The scenario above might have been a hypothetical situation, but several elements in there have already happened in real life. Attacks on trains are becoming far more frequent in the Pacific Northwest. Indigenous tribal lands are getting invaded by law enforcement, and people are getting seriously injured or killed on their own land. The push to destroy the fossil fuel industry is about to crash into the law of unintended consequences, and there have been too many accidental oil and chemical disasters for there to be any justification in creating deliberate ones, adding to a litany of supply chain issues that are poised to make the world go into scarcity mindset. Nobody is going to take the need to invest in infrastructure seriously when we wake up and realize that we try to make the world a better place, only to bequeath it to those who experience a sexual thrill in watching the world burn.

In mid-September, the anarchists in black were found guilty on all counts of inciting violence against a railroad carrier. They face a possible 20 years in federal prison, and it appears that even the anarcho-communists on Twitter have disavowed their fellow comrades. Nobody gets the good china out when the FBI knocks on the door at dinnertime.

Which is a shame, because the female/non-binary anarchists who derailed their young lives didn’t start out as hardened domestic terrorists. Both were a much loved force for positivity, inclusion, and self sufficiency in nature, the kind of people who volunteered at soup kitchens and mentored preteens. Were they disillusioned by a system that seems rigged against so many, embracing the nihilism amplified by lockdowns? Or were they galvanized and energized by an echo chamber of equally radicalized peers who gave them a chance to be a latter-day Joan of Arc?

Female terrorists fascinate the world, if only because they defy just about every tenet of socially acceptable womanhood. They refuse to be the anvil, insisting on wielding sword and hammer. Righting the wrongs is a war of attrition, and sometimes, they pick the wrong hill to die on.

Ashli Babbitt did just that on January 6th, 2021. She didn’t start out intending to overthrow the government, either. What makes a veteran of a foreign war choose to switch sides against the country she was willing to die for? Was the glow and fiery energy that sustained her in her final few weeks on this planet a cover for a soldier who didn’t feel like it was acceptable to admit her inner torment to the husband and family who loved her dearly? She was not carrying a weapon when she and the other insurrectionists breached the Capitol. Intriguingly, she would have been one of the most lethal had she had a firearm in her possession. Perhaps she thought that the crowd would intimidate the Capitol Hill Police and lawmakers enough to cow them into submission, stopping the count of the Electoral College. Perhaps she believed she was a modern Joan of Arc too.

Turning Ashli Babbitt into a martyr for the far right doesn’t serve anyone. Her actions were poorly thought out and dangerous, but she was not irredeemable. Thirty-five is still young enough to reevaluate one’s response to the world, to pay the debt back to society, to understand that the people who love them would happily trade the beatification of their image for a media manufactured cause just to hug them and help them overcome the chaos and rigidity in their heads. Unfortunately, Ashli sealed her own fate, and won’t get that chance.

Samantha Brooks and Ellen Reiche are young as well, still in their twenties. Spending an extended period of time in federal prison is going to suck, particularly because they are now dependent on the government infrastructure they sought to obliterate. Their comrades in the outside world will find a new Joan of Arc to anoint, manipulate, and dispose of when they’re no longer politically expedient. Fortunately, they’re still alive, and not killed in a fiery train wreck or shot by law enforcement. They can still channel their considerable energy and leadership skills into something positive and when they exit the correctional system, put the past in perspective behind them, moving forward into a brighter future. Theirs is not a fatal derailment, by any means.