In the Altoona-Johnstown area and around other communities in the Norfolk Southern/Amtrak railroad corridor west and east, when something railroad-related is in the news, residents tend to pay attention.

For example, in recent years, some major issues attracting considerable public attention were railroads’ efforts to implement one-person freight-train crews; employment reductions at Altoona’s railroad shops; and the derailment of toxic-chemical-carrying rail cars in East Palestine, Ohio, just over the Ohio-Pennsylvania border.

Then there was an activist investor campaign against Norfolk Southern and the departure of Norfolk Chief Executive Alan Shaw as the result of an alleged improper relationship with an employee at the railroad.

If all of that wasn’t enough, attention and concern now has shifted to dangers posed by freight trains’ length, which now are often one or two miles long, to reportedly as long as 2.5 miles in length.

Most people do not think to worry about the forces affecting trains — the long ones as well as the shorter ones. But the forces are real and dangers emanating from those forces also are real, as a long-awaited report issued earlier this month indicates.

In that report, which was the topic of a front-page article in the Sept. 18 Mirror, the National Academies of Sciences points out that, as freight trains have grown longer, the U.S. has seen an increase in the number of a type of derailment caused by the forces of railcars pushing and pulling against each other.

The report urges regulators, Congress and the rail industry to re-examine the risks. It also urges railroads to be very cautious about the way they assemble trains, especially those with a mix of different types of cars.

Good advice.

According to the report, railroads can make long trains easier to control by including locomotives in the middle and back of them to help pull and stop them.

The report says it also is important for railroads to take great care in where they place heavy tank cars, empty cars and specialized cars like automotive carriers.

Recommendations such as those might not be as important for trains operating primarily on level or nearly level terrain, but consider the terrain eastbound from Cresson and Gallitzin toward Altoona.

If something were to go seriously wrong due to a botched organizing of a train’s component units, the possibilities are many of what destruction or worse could be wreaked, even within the boundaries of the city of Altoona.

“Long trains aren’t inherently dangerous,” said Peter Swan, a Penn State University professor who was one of the report’s authors. “But if you don’t have adequate planning on how to put the train together, they can be.”

The terrain in this part of Pennsylvania confirms what unions representing train crews have been saying — that on a train that is more than a mile long, one section can be going uphill while another section is going downhill.

In the Sept. 18 Mirror article in question, it was reported that the number of derailments in the U.S. has held steady at more than 1,000 a year, or more than three a day, even as rail traffic has decreased.

Although railroads have classified two-thirds of those derailments as minor, the number of incidents speaks loudly about the need for the best judgment possible in preparations for a coming trip.

Hoping for good luck, without the most complete preparations possible, is not an option.