The nature of news reporting that has occurred around the Lac Megantic train disaster has been, at best, poor.

Trains have reserve tanks on every car that are pressurized by the engine. When the pressure is lost by the engine, the tank valves close, meaning they can accept air pressure in a one-way valve of sorts.

The loss of pressure from the engine triggers air brakes on all cars from the reserve tanks.

To release the brakes, you have to pressurize the entire system. Manual brakes are not needed, but are included.

The train would release its brakes if every single individual train reserve tank somehow all had leaks, or if someone manually released air from each tank one at a time.

I have yet to read an article, from any news source nationally, that explains how the train brakes were released.

It is therefore my opinion that Maine’s newspapers should fund old-fashioned reporting, where research is included in the process, not just printing sound bytes and headlines.

To honor the dead, explain how the brakes were released please.

Ted Trebilcock, Topsham

Editor’s note: According to the Transportation Safety Board of Canada, at about 10:50 p.m. on July 5, 2013, “a Montreal, Maine & Atlantic Railway locomotive engineer parked a train on a descending trade on the main track in Nantes, Quebec. He applied the hand brakes on all five locomotives, plus two other cars, and shut down all but the lead locomotive. …That night (during a mandatory test to ensure the hand brakes would hold), the locomotive air brakes were left on during the test, meaning the train was being held by a combination of hand brakes and air brakes, and giving a false impression that the hand brakes alone would hold the train. When a fire began in the engine of the lead locomotive, in keeping with railway instructions, emergency responders shut off the engine, which subsequently caused the air holding the locomotive air brakes to leak off. Without enough force from the hand brakes, the train began rolling downhill toward Lac-Megantic, just over seven miles away.” For the full text of the TSB investigation, go to tsb.gc.ca