Every day, a train more than a mile long travels alongside a highway in Albany, N.Y., a half-mile from the state capitol building and even closer to houses. Its cargo is crude oil from North Dakota, which federal regulators and railroads fear is more explosive than other oils. In the past year, Albany has become an unlikely hub for the U.S. oil business, taking in shipments by rail and sending them out by ship down the Hudson River to refineries. Now officials there are trying to get up to speed on how to handle a potential oil-train accident, as are their peers from Chicago to Denver to New Orleans. Railroad officials don’t like to talk about it, but oil trains are rumbling through many large cities because of surging output from North Dakota’s Bakken shale. Functioning as pipelines on rails, tanker cars full of oil pass through Detroit, Philadelphia, […]