Withholding these plans from the public may indeed prevent some terrorists from coming up with really devastating attacks. But they aren’t the terrorists officials should be worried about. The dangerous terrorists are fully capable of designing and executing devastating attacks all by themselves.

Once upon a time the public was asked to be vigilant about likely attack sites: transportation nexuses, power plants, cultural symbols like the Statue of Liberty, etc. The same policy should apply to these railroad scenarios.

On the other hand, I do see reasons for keeping them private. One would be to minimize public knowledge of oil tank car traffic. There’s already considerable opposition to such traffic, and railroad execs know it. IIRC, it was in Seattle that a private citizen personally counted the oil trains daily for a period of time; this was the only way he could get information on them.

On the up side there is the fact that by virtue of using tracks trains can be, if we were so inclined and willing to allocate resources, routed away from the most sensitive areas. If a train wreck happens at a sensitive spot it is, at least in part, because someone put the tracks there. Where it is unavoidable the tracks and associated systems and controls can be designed to drastically lower the chances of an accident and/or the damage done.

Also, by virtue of the trains transporting their cargo in individual cars there is some potential to limit the numbers and amounts of volatile cargo involved in any accident. In WW2 it wasn’t uncommon for trains carrying explosives to have a short train ahead of them to detect problems with the track and for the railway cars on the back train to have buffer cars, often cars filled with sand, inserted between cars carrying explosives. even in a massive derailment two or three cars filled with gravel or sand can compartmentalize the destruction.

This isn’t meant to be a manual, but merely to point out that train wrecks are engineering problems that can managed through allocations of resources like any other issue. They don’t have to happen as often as they do, and they don’t have to be as destructive as they are.

It also has to be pointed out that pipelines are not without their own issues. Railroad issues are obvious and so they will, in time, and as political capital is allocated, be handled. Pipeline issues are less obvious, more treacherous, and are at least as dangerous.

That isn’t to say that they can’t be managed.

These officials seem not to have heard. There is this thing on the internet called Google Maps. It offers options for street view and satellite view, the latter of which is based at least partly on public domain images. Anybody can look at these maps and find target locations of the sort Greg describes. No assistance from the railroad companies is needed.

Security through obscurity might work with information that only two or three people know. I suspect that many more than three people were involved in producing the report. The chances that someone will talk rapidly approach 100% as you add people beyond the third. And that’s even before you consider the possibility of somebody figuring it out independently.

“… to put it out in the public domain is like giving terrorists a road map on how to do something bad.”

If that is the best excuse they can come up with I would guess the plan is just as shitty: based on recent history, any terrorist, domestic or otherwise, who is worth his or her salt already knows how to do something bad. If these trains haven’t yet been targeted it’s likely because of a decision that there are better targets around.

I’ll simply add that it isn’t just bridges over water that we need to be concerned about: here in Michigan there is on-going concern over an oil pipeline Enbridge (the folks who fouled the Kalamazoo River a few years ago) have beneath the Straights of Mackinac. Apparently the data they have concerning it is “too complex” for state officials to make hide or hair of. (From other sources the problem seems to be an incredibly badly written report from Enbridge, with no real effort to summarize or explain aspects of the data.)

http://www.mlive.com/news/grand-rapids/index.ssf/2015/08/enbridge_line_5_inspection_dat.html#incart_river