BEWARE the inappropriate smile… When I inhabited the image-making or breaking world of public relations, I can’t remember how many times we used to drum that into managers who were called upon to stand in front of the cameras when the going got tough and the chips were down.

And heaven knows, working on the railway in the nineties and early noughties when there seemed to be a rail crash every five minutes, it was a mantra to be ignored at your peril.

But looking at the performance of the rail boss whose runaway oil train wreaked such deadly and devastating havoc in the tiny Canadian town of Lac-Megantic a couple of weeks ago. He’s either one of those people who thinks PR types are a fluffy waste of space so ignores every bit of advice he’s given because he knows best, or he doesn’t actually have access to public relations advice in the first place.

Fifty people are thought to have been killed in the oil train fireball. No one is totally sure because at the time of writing only 38 have been positively identified. Another 12 are still missing and it’s doubtful whether there will be enough of their remains left to actually find them.

It’s the worst rail accident in the last 150 years of Canada’s rail history. It’s brought destruction to a small town and ripped out its heart. For the people of Lac-Megantic, this is their 9-11.

Canada’s prime minister Stephen Harper was quick to realise this and just a day later he visited the town and stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Quebec's premier Pauline Marois in a show of Canadian unity and solidarity.

Yet what did rail boss Ed Burkhardt do? He stayed holed up in his office in Chicago for four days apparently on the phone to his insurance company. And when he did finally deign to set foot in Lac Megantic, the townsfolk were so incensed, not only by his reluctance to show his face for four long days but his attitude when he finally did so, that he had to have a protective police escort during his time there.

In front of the cameras he was cringe-makingly arrogant. A smirky, insensitive smile played on his lips. Not once did he offer his sympathy to the Lac Megantic community. Not once did he say he was sorry for what had happened. Instead, in a shocking display of corporate backside protecting, he came straight out and blamed the train driver for allegedly not setting the handbrakes on the train as he left it in overnight sidings. “I don’t think he’ll be back working for us,” he said with a finality that has probably turned the driver into a basket case, if indeed he wasn’t one before.

He’s guilty, said Burkhardt, even though the day before Canada’s Transportation Safety Board had been at great pains to point out that the inevitable investigation into the cause of the tragedy was extremely complex and would take considerable time to unravel. We have a friend and colleague who’s a big cheese in North American rail circles who says Burkhardt’s performance has harmed the reputation of the rail industry and not just across the Atlantic but globally – through his monstrous lack of inaction and concern. For this was the man who was in charge of a huge chunk of Britain’s railways for more than a decade and who had his headquarters right here in Yorkshire down the road in Doncaster. He founded English, Welsh and Scottish Railway (EWS) back in 1996, which with its 900 locomotives, 19,000 freight wagons and 7,000 employees, handled nearly all of our rail-borne freight and shuttled it around Britain. No one wanted Burkhardt to break down in front of the cameras or beg forgiveness from the Lac-Megantic townsfolk, although some warped “it’d be great telly!” studio executive might well have done. Clearly he can’t personally put right the impact of loss of life, jobs and homes that will take years to address as the town slowly rebuilds its core and strives to get back its soul.

But he could have show some basic human empathy. Doesn’t matter whether it’s in Canada or York, I know from bitter experience from my time on the railway and being directly involved in the aftermath of five major rail crashes one of them a too-close-to-home 25 miles down the road at Great Heck – that when such devastation occurs, the attitude of those at the top is crucial to the eventual coming to terms with such brutally life-changing events for those innocents who have suffered through no fault of their own.