The freight train industry is in Washington's hot seat.
This tragedy demands accountability because
future derailments will happen.
Even one incident can have a dramatic impact on a
community. We've got to keep working.
We've got to continue that drive.
And that march to zero.
Derailments can happen in a variety of places.
There's periods of increase and decrease with different
railroads from 2011 to 2021.
While derailments are on the decline since 2014, just a
handful of companies are seeing a surge, most
famously Norfolk Southern.
Norfolk Southern, Norfolk Southern.
I saw it. I know how it looked.
It was scary. I'd never seen anything like that.
I think they handled it terribly.
It was an environmental disaster.
This was 100% preventable.
It was just the perfect storm of unsafe working
conditions gone wild.
We've got to change the model somehow because the
business model has still got a lot of risk to it.
How often do trains derail and why?
And how can the industry prevent more scenes like
East Palestine?
At least three Norfolk Southern trains have
derailed since East Palestine, but no injuries
or spills were reported.
Competing railroads like CSX and Union Pacific have
had derailments in 2023 as well.
Berkshire Hathaway's BNSF saw at least three trains
derail in March.
In one case, nearly 5000 gallons of diesel fuel
spilled into tribal reservation lands and trains
have continued to derail in April of 2023.
Derailments are a common occurrence, and although
they've trended downward over the past decade, a
small uptick was reported in recent years.
There are roughly 1000 incidents a year, but most
occur within a rail yard.
Yard movements are more complex, so they're more
prone to having these smaller incidents.
Most of the accidents that do occur go unreported
because the feds don't require any reporting.
I think unless you're up over $8,000.
So your statistics might be giving us a false sense of
comfort.
The crashes have weighed on some of the large freight
companies stock in 2023.
If that appears to be getting out of control in a
higher risk, well, you better come up with a better
braking system or more predictive failure analysis,
or you might not be chosen anymore.
At some point they're going to say it's just too risky.
Some railroad employees say that corporations have made
strategic changes that could be making catastrophic
accidents more likely.
I started working on the railroad in 1974 at the
Chicago Northwestern.
Mark Burrows is a former engineer with decades of
experience.
I kind of started out in the tail end of what some would
consider the the last of the good old days where we
actually had semi-respectable working
conditions.
The freight industry used to rely on coal, but the coal
trade is shrinking as a result.
Jobs in the freight industry are on the decline
as well. Hiring across all job categories from yard
workers to executives is on the decline.
So to become more competitive:
Trains got longer, got heavier.
We got on more and more of a barbaric working schedule,
attendance policies and all this was before precision
scheduled railroading.
In recent years, rail companies have revised their
business plans to increase operating efficiency.
Some call this technique precision scheduled
railroading or PSR.
PSR is a management strategy, and the management
strategy is trying to increase efficiency and
reduce costs.
Precision scheduled railroading was an attempt
to take out both capital costs and operating costs.
Which entails maximum exploitation
of as minimal workers as possible.
Probably every class one railroad really runs a
different model.
Most of the major US railroads have reported
using this strategic approach. Norfolk Southern
took up the practice in 2019.
Overall operating ratios for all class one railroads,
they decreased, which means there's an increase in
profits. The average operating ratio went from
73in 2011 to 62, and that reflects a net increase
revenue of about 58% from about 18 billion to 28
billion.
One example change from PSR.
Trains are getting longer in 2022.
We queried the class ones and all the class ones told
us they are running longer trains.
So for instance, one class one told us that their
length of trains increased 33% from 2011 to
2021. There was also another class one that told
us that the percentage of trains that they are running
that are over 10,000ft, which is almost a two mile
train, increased from 3% to 25%
in 2021.
As you're getting two and three mile long trains, it's
a lot to contend with.
Railroads are going to run the length of trains based
on their physical infrastructure. In the
Midwest, you might have a significantly longer train
than if you're in a more dense urban area.
Neither the industry, neither the regulator,
neither GAO has been able to draw any sort of
correlation between safety and train length and ease.
Palestine. A small crew manned a long train.
The lead locomotive had three crew members,
including one trainee.
There were also 149 rail cars on the train.
When you have a trainee with an already skeletal crew,
that actually makes it harder.
Every time you can take a person out of the cab who's
making, you know, $80,000 or more.
This is an easy way, relatively easy way for
railroad managers to figure out how to reduce costs.
As the industry cuts workers, the government sees
a potential safety concern.
Before a train departs.
You need to have a railroad employee check the train.
One of the concerns that we heard was that railroads may
have compensated for the reduction in mechanical
staff by having other types of staff like conductors do
those pre-departure checks.
And the worry here was that folks, like conductors, may
not have the expertise or the training that your
mechanical staff had.
And so they may be missing some things and that could
impact safety.
The concern for communities are that longer trains might
block the grade crossing if the train is longer.
That could create negative effects on the community.
We talked to officials in Ohio and they reported that
they have 22 freight trains that travel through their
town daily.
They have a 16,000 foot train that comes through
which blocks 4 to 5 grade crossings at a time.
Also risky pedestrian or motorist behavior, you know,
trying to make it across the tracks before a train
comes that can result in fatalities.
But the stakes in the freight industry can be much
higher.
On February 3rd, 2023.
In the evening, an eastbound train derailed
near the Pennsylvania border.
A train derailed, poisoning thousands of people
in that town.
And the reason that happened was because so
many checks and balances that we used to have have
been eliminated.
Federal investigators point to a faulty bearing on the
train. The hot bearing went undetected by the industry's
safety sensors.
The bearing heat detector, also known as a hot box
detector, measures the temperature of bearings as a
train goes by.
And if a bearing starts to become overheated, it sends
an alert to the train with an order to stop the train.
When I was running trains, when the hot box detector
gave us a robo message over the radio, it was our
responsibility to stop, inspect, deal with it, and
take whatever corrective action.
Now, in the last several years, they have taken that
responsibility from the crew.
Somebody up in an office in a desk is monitoring.
38 rail cars flew off the tracks in the crash.
Some were filled with hazardous chemicals.
Officials at the site saw the potential for a fire
that could burn wildly out of control.
The temperatures were rising, caused our
independent expert to become very concerned about
the potential for an uncontrolled explosion that
would shoot harmful gas and shrapnel into a populated
community. So our independent consultant and
the Ohio EPA recommended a unified command for a
controlled burn and a controlled release.
The explosion sent chemicals into the air and ground
contaminating nearby waterways, according to a
Justice Department complaint.
It may move percolate down into soils and groundwater,
which we cannot easily see.
There was easy examples of contamination surfaced out
in many videos, including our senator J.D.
Vance, where he stirred the stream and suddenly a sheen
of that appeared to be an oil or a contaminant showed
up.
The fact that these chemicals are still seeping
in the ground is an insult to the people who live in
East Palestine.
Those are the challenges that may be hidden in the
stream beds or if percolated down through the
soils, may have created a groundwater plume that are
invisible.
The environmental calamity could prove dire to
residents health and cast a cloud over the local
economy. The company has already been ordered to
clean up the site and pay all associated costs.
If folks in this community want additional air testing
in their home, they'll get it.
If folks in this community want additional water
testing, they'll get it.
Even though there was a very good action done early on by
EPA. But the way it lingered on and impacted the
local community and we still don't know if the
environment is clean and restored to its original
chemical state.
So more of these groundwater cleanup
operations may go for a decade.
In response to this story, Norfolk Southern said its
total number of accidents has dropped, including
derailments. The company also says it's focusing less
on operating ratio.
Moving forward.
I think in this case, Norfolk Southern had an
opportunity to a better job of being on top of the
situation. They didn't prove their listening and
their response to questions that were being asked.
And they came in a little late and now they're in
catch up mode. And it didn't have to happen that
way.
People were living next to the rail tracks.
The contamination happened next to their homes.
So clearly the local community gets directly
impacted short term because of health hazards and looks
like there are long term implications related to
their society.
It shouldn't take a train derailment for elected
officials to put partisanship aside and work
together.
For now, the industry is making changes ahead of any
new rules.
The rail industry committed to installing another 1000
hotbox detectors across its network.
Again, these are steps that are voluntarily taken
because our business understands that safety is
key.
Rail infrastructure gets relatively high marks in the
US, but experts believe that there are unknown risks
that must be uncovered in the freight sector.
FRA has something called risk reduction plans.
They're also doing studies like we talked about on
employee fatigue.
They're doing more looking at blocked crossings.
There's a study on going on longer trains.
Also they have a braking study that they've been
doing for quite a while.
They should take a look at their regulations to see if
there are gaps related to safety concerns.
Experts also believe the industry could use
technology to prevent accidents.
You could have done a predictive analysis like we
do for track failures to say you've got to stop this
train, not because it hit the fail safe minimum,
because it's going to hit the failsafe minimum
somewhere east of Columbus.
Why wasn't that kind of predictive analysis done?
And what's the cost?
Because you didn't do it.
These regulations could add another headwind for the
industry as it fights to stay relevant.
If I were the head of the FRA today, there'd be
shorter trains, there'd be dignified working
conditions. At the very minimum, Carmen would have
the time they need to properly inspect the cars.
There's no room for compromising safety one iota
in the rail industry because a a worker could get
injured, maimed, killed, and B, we can have
situations like East Palestine.