‘An Industry on the Brink of Disaster’
The profit-driven railroad industry continues to fight safety measures in the aftermath of the East Palestine train derailment disaster.
By Steve Wishnia
Editor’s Note: This is part one of a special two-part Work-Bites report on increasing dangers inside the nation’s railroad industry.
On May 23, the Justice Department and the Environmental Protection Agency announced a proposed settlement in which the Norfolk Southern railroad would pay more than $310 million to cover remediation costs from the February 2023 train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio. The town of 4,800 people had to be partially evacuated after about 50 cars on a 9,300-foot train derailed, including five carrying vinyl chloride, and some caught fire. The highly toxic gas, used in plastic manufacturing, had to be released and burned to avert an explosion.
The East Palestine disaster illustrates the hazardous results of years of reduced crew sizes, corporate consolidation, and cuts to maintenance and inspections of tracks and trains, several freight-railroad workers and union officials told Work-Bites.
“It’s an industry on the brink of disaster because of low man count,” says Matthew A. Weaver, a national organizer for the Teamsters-affiliated Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way Employees and a member of the cross-craft coalition Railroad Workers United.
A new federal rule requiring two-member crews on the nation’s six largest railroads, announced April 2, is expected to stall the industry’s push toward having engineers operate trains by themselves. It is scheduled to go into effect June 10.
But four railroads—Union Pacific, BNSF, and two short-line carriers, the Indiana Railroad and the Florida East Coast Railway—immediately filed separate-but-identical lawsuits asking federal courts to block the rule. On April 19, Republican House members introduced a resolution to have Congress void it.
Safety Issues
The main safety issues are crew size, the growing length of trains, the reduced maintenance caused by “precision scheduled railroading,” and overwork.
“Carriers desire to remove the conductor from the cab of the locomotive. The safety implications of that are almost infinite,” says Jared Cassity, alternate national legislative director of SMART-TD and head of the union’s national safety team.
“Two people in a cab is needed; one-hundred-percent needed,” adds Randy Fannon, vice president for safety of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen. “Many accidents would be worse without that second person.”
The major freight carriers largely reduced crews to two people in the 1990s, and have been trying to get them down to one person for 20 years. Hugh Sawyer, 66, a Norfolk Southern engineer and RWU member, recalls that when he started out in as a trainee in Atlanta’s Inman Yard 36 years ago, he was the sixth crew member, along with an engineer, fireman, yard fireman or conductor, and two helpers.
Now, he says, “they want me to take that train from Atlanta to Chattanooga by myself.”
One reason the second crew member is necessary, he says, is that freight trains are now largely run by computer software called Positive Train Control. The engineer has to spend more time looking at the screen instead of out the windshield, so the conductor will warn them if they’re nearing a slow zone or if there’s a truck blocking the tracks.
The software was intended to be background information, Carrity says, but “it needs constant observation.” It reports changes to terrain, information from the dispatcher, and signals, and monitors throttle levels on remote-controlled engines. (On trains that are more than a mile and a half long, there are five engines—two in the front, two in the middle, and one in the back, the last three remote-controlled.)
Once when he was driving, Carrity says, he didn’t see that there was a person on the tracks because he had to concentrate on the screen. The conductor was the one who saw them and blew the train’s warning whistle.
Another issue, he adds, is if a train has to stop at a road crossing, “it takes two people to separate a train” to let vehicles go through. The railroad companies say they have trucks on call for those situations, but Carrity says those aren’t always available, or can’t get through backed-up traffic.
Rail unions pushed hard for the rule, supplying many of the more than 13,000 public comments the Federal Railroad Administration [FRA] received while considering it.
The Association of American Railroads [AAR], the trade group that represents the major freight carriers, calls crew-size regulations “blunt instruments that impede the ability of the railroads and unions to resolve the complex issues surrounding staffing and scheduling predictability.” It says that would “hamstring” railroads’ efforts to compete with commercial trucking, which hopes to begin running self-driving trucks later this year. It dismisses the unions’ insistence on the two-person minimum as “purported safety concerns” used to resist “any railroad staffing changes prompted by improvements in technology.”
The FRA says the crew-size minimum’s purpose is to “ensure that trains are adequately staffed,” especially for emergency situations such as derailments or the engineer becoming incapacitated. The rule allows smaller railroads to run some one-person trains, subject to conditions such as having working communications with the dispatcher and not carrying hazardous material.
The American Short Line and Regional Railroad Association, a trade group of smaller carriers, is opposing the rule. “While lacking any safety data, FRA is imposing new obligations on short-line railroads, requiring them to devote finite resources toward solving a nonexistent problem,” Chuck Baker, the group’s president, said in a statement released by Rep. Eric Burlison (R-Mo.), lead sponsor of the attempt to have Congress reject it.
The two-member minimum won’t be secure unless it’s codified into law, says Jared Cassity.
“The bad news is that the shelf life of administrative rules is inextricably tied to politics, and the continuation of the rule is going to depend on the results of the Nov. 5th election,” the Texas AFL-CIO said Apr. 3.
Ever-longer Trains
“The average length of a Class I freight train has grown substantially in recent years, to nearly three miles in some cases,” the Federal Railroad Administration said in justifying the need for the two-member crew rule.
As railroad owners demand longer trains to maximize usage and profit, their length has gotten “out of control,” says Cassity: It’s up 25% in the past five years, and trains two miles long, roughly 150 to 200 cars, are common.
According to AAR, the median train length on the six Class I railroads in 2022 was about 5,400 feet. But the longest 10% were more than 9,800 feet, up from slightly below 8,000 feet in 2010, and the longest 1% above 14,000 feet, up from 10,000 in 2010.
Those carriers have all been lengthening their trains. The trade group argues that is more cost-effective, and “distributed power”—multiple engines—makes them safer. It also says that running fewer trains with more cars burns less fuel.
Overwork
Overwork was the main issue in the 2022 freight-rail contract dispute, when the federal government imposed a settlement that continued denying workers paid sick days. (“I feel failed by Biden, even though I’m a Biden voter,” says Weaver.)
Hugh Sawyer says that 60-hour workweeks are typical. He has seniority and isn’t allowed to work more than 12 hours a day, but can be on duty for 14 to 16 hours a day.
“There’s no consistency for fatigue management if they work on call,” says Randy Fannon. “A person can work seven days a week.”
A 2008 federal law limits workers to six days a week, he explains, but there’s a loophole. If someone works from 2-8 a.m. and comes back the next morning at 9, for example, it’s counted as a day off because they had 24 hours between shifts.
PSR And Lack Of Maintenance
The emergence of “precision scheduled railroading” as the industry’s dominant business model over the past seven years—maximizing the use of cars and tracks, and eliminating any slack or redundancy—has meant “not having a budget for maintenance,” says Matthew Weaver.
Inspections for outgoing trains are now “shortened or less specific,” he says. They used to be done by two to four people per car, at least one on each side, checking the wheels, the knuckles (the couplers), and the air brakes, and looking for oil leaks. Now there’s only one inspector, who spends less than a minute on each car.
The six major carriers are also “eliminating crafts,” workers qualified to do specific types of inspections, says Cassity. Carmen, who inspect cars, serve a three-year apprenticeship, but almost all have been furloughed or laid off. Instead, they’re using conductors, and having laborers with three weeks’ training inspect locomotives.
They are using a loophole in federal regulations to do this, Cassity continues: Inspections are supposed to be done by qualified craftspeople—“when available.” That clause was intended for temporary emergencies, such as checking whether a train that develops a problem on the road can be brought back to the yard safely, not for standard inspections.
Another issue is wayside “hot box detectors,” which detect the temperature and defects of train components passing by. They are neither required nor regulated by federal law. The information from them often just goes to the dispatcher, not the train crew, says Weaver. “Our dispatchers are overworked.”
The East Palestine disaster “definitely could have been prevented,” says Sawyer.
A detector about 20 miles west of the town indicated a “hot journal” on the train—a bearing that was trending hot, meaning “it’s not serious, but it’s going to be serious,” he explains. It often means that a brake is sticking. But the engineer wouldn’t know that unless the dispatcher or wayside person warned them, and there was only one person monitoring the computer receiving the information.
“I’ve been in the same situation,” Sawyer says. Once on the Atlanta-Chattanooga run, the person monitoring the computer told him he had a “hot axle.” “I just stopped my train. It was a hot journal and it was leaking grease,” he says.
The dispatcher told him and the engineer of a train ahead of him with a similar problem to keep going until they found a side track to pull off onto.
“They were playing games with a car that was carrying hazardous material,” Sawyer says. “They’ve got number-crunchers saying ‘we will accept this risk.’”