Rail safety grabbed headlines this February after a Norfolk Southern train passed sensors designed to flag mechanical issues and catastrophically derailed in East Palestine, Ohio. 38 cars carrying hazardous materials derailed putting the safety of an entire community in peril.
On March 4, 2023, another Norfolk Southern train derailed near Springfield, Ohio. The train was not transporting any hazardous chemicals when the 28 cars of the 212-car train derailed.
On March 9, 2023, a third train derailed in Calhoun County, Alabama hours before CEO Alan Shaw met with lawmakers to discuss the February derailment. Thirty seven cars and two waybill locomotives derailed with no injuries or hazardous leaks.
Before these latest incidents, in June 2019 a 2.2-mile-long Union Pacific train derailed in Nevada. It was so long and the terrain so mountainous that at times sections of the train climbed uphill while other sections climbed downhill, which made driving it a nightmare. Ultimately the engineer couldn’t manage it, and the train lifted a car up and dropped it on the ground. Twenty-seven cars followed.
Republicans and Democrats alike are now calling for tighter regulations on company operations, especially in light of precision scheduled railroading.
The corporations that ran those trains have adopted a moneymaking strategy to move cargo faster than ever, with fewer workers, on trains that are consistently longer than at any time in history. Driven by the efficiency goals of precision scheduled railroading, companies are forgoing long-held safety precautions, such as assembling trains to distribute weight and risk or taking the proper time to inspect them, ProPublica found. Instead, their rushed workers are stringing together trains that stretch for 2 or even 3 miles, sometimes without regard for the delicate physics of keeping heavy, often combustible tanker cars from jumping off the tracks.
None of these recent derailments have caused the Federal Railroad Administration, the agency in charge of train safety, to intercede.
Today, the rail administration says it lacks enough evidence that long trains pose a particular risk. But ProPublica discovered that this is only because the agency doesn’t require companies to provide certain basic information after accidents — notably, the length of the train — that would allow it to assess once and for all the extent of the danger.
“It’s one of our biggest frustrations, without question,” said Jared Cassity, the alternate national legislative director for the International Association of Sheet Metal, Air, Rail and Transportation Workers, or SMART. The union representative said the agency can track train length for accidents “and they’ve chosen not to.”
In the absence of data, the industry insists that long trains have actually helped to improve rail safety, pointing to an overall decline in derailments, and notes that regulators have never cited length as the direct cause of an accident. The nation’s seven largest rail companies, the so-called Class 1s, echo these points, defending their safety practices and saying that PSR has led to fewer problems.
But it is a significant fact that for generations, railroad workers considered a 1.4-mile-long train huge and hard to manage. Now they have doubled in length.
Hunter Harrison, railroad innovator and CEO of Illinois Central, came along in the 1980’s and changed the equation between train length and safety: Longer trains would become integral to the management philosophy he dubbed precision scheduled railroading. By 2013, Harrison was CEO of Canadian Pacific when he wrote in its annual report: “We’re driving longer and longer trains, which means fewer train starts, faster network velocity and better service at lower cost.”
Harrison left Canadian Pacific to run CSX in 2017; that year, the company reported $249 million in “efficiency savings.”
Across the country, worried state lawmakers have tried to cap the lengths of trains that roll through their communities. Since 2019, in Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas, Georgia, Nebraska, Washington, Arizona and other states, lawmakers have proposed maximum lengths of 1.4 to about 1.6 miles. But every proposal has died before becoming law. Opponents, which include Class 1 railroad companies, claim that the efforts are driven by unions to create jobs and that the proposals would violate interstate commerce laws, but it is clear that the Harrison formula for cost efficiency and profit tramples safety issues such as the excessive and unmanageable length of trains.
