The story opens with six of the Lac-Megantic victims talking about the derailment : a young girl asks an older woman if she knows the men responsible for the disaster. The older woman tells her that she doesn't because "They laid their plans hundreds of thousands of kilometers from our town..."
One morning in 2012 the mayor of Nantes had two men from the railway company visit his office. They inform him that from now on there will be only one man on the oil trains passing through - the train will be a "one-man crew". The mayor is stunned that only one man will be on a train with "hundreds of tank cars full of explosive". They tell him that the minister has already approved such a crew. The mayor asks what will happen if the brakes fail? Their response is that there is an automatic device called a "dead man's switch" which will stop the train. Nantes mayor doubts the train will stop on the rotten rails.
It is on June 30, 2013, in North Dakota that the Lac-Megantic story begins. Canadian Pacific Railway controls the shipping in of drilling equipment and the transport out of crude oil to refineries and ports in North Dakota. In 2013, 140,000 tank cars transported oil out of state. On June 30, 2013, 250 DOT-407 tanker trucks travel to New Town, to fill 75 DOT-111 tank cars, part of CP Train No. 606-282. The DOT-111 tank cars are too fragile to transport the oil which has been classified as 1267 Class 3, PGI - the most dangerous and most explosive. They are used though because they are cheap to rent. Instead, the cargo's rating is deliberately altered to PG III, as safe oil, non-explosive. Train No. 606-282 leaves on June 30th for the Irving Refinery in Saint John, New Brunswick, a journey of over three thousand kilometers.
On July 1, CP invoices Irving Oil for Train 606-282. On July 5th, the train arrives in Cote-Saint-Luc, Montreal where Montreal, Maine and Atlantic takes over. It is renamed MMA-002. MMA has been flagged by various transportation agencies in both the U.S. and Canada as having a poor safety record. In the MMA office in Farnham, Quebec, Engine 5017 is put on as the lead on the train despite having serious problems. The train is inspected by Transport Canada and given permission to continue on. Tom Harding is the lone driver on MMA-002 to Lac-Megantic. From there, an American driver will take the train to New Brunswick.
A Train In The Night is an informative graphic nonfiction account of the Lac-Megantic railway disaster. Saint-Cerny employs a victim of the disaster as narrator, an older woman who explains to a young child-victim the events leading up to the tragedy and identifying those really responsible. The events begin thousands of miles away, in the oil-rich shales of North Dakota. Saint-Cerny who arrived in Lac-Megantic five days after what she calls "Night Zero", was determined to seek out the truth, after discrepancies began to appear in reports about the accident. As she writes in her piece, Megantic, the sad telling of a capitalist story" at the back of the book,
"From the start the only official explanation was a simplistic one: The disaster was blamed on the error of just one man, alone in the mountains, who was alleged to have applied an insufficient number of brakes when parking his train. And from the start I decided that this time I would uncover the truth: Who had made it possible for one man, by himself, a single employee on the bottom rung of the hierarchy, to be allowed to leave the keys on the seat of a locomotive hauling seventy-two bombs along defective track and to leave it running all night?"
Quesnel's illustrations are visceral: for example, the shock of the explosion is done in red, with the images of four of the victims killed by the explosion shown first against a peaceful blue background and in subsequent pages blacked out first on a white page, then against a deep red background with the Sacred Heart of Jesus statue at the bottom. Marc Garneau and John Baird, Canadian government ministers who enable the removal or reduction of significant safety and environmental protections are portrayed behind a bleeding Maple Leaf. And, in another comic panel, Lady Justice is shown decapitated with a black crow on top, signifying the thwarting of justice in the court trial in which a victim is tried rather than the true perpetrators of the disaster.
A Train In The Night: The Tragedy of Lac-Megantic by Anne-Marie Saint-Cerny and Christian Quesnel
Toronto: Between The Lines 2022
87 pp.