WASHINGTON—In the Senate, a bipartisan bill on rail safety initiated by Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, is stalled by railroad industry lobbying and campaign cash, from both the rail firms and their Wall Street backers. Ohio’s other senator, Republican J.D. Vance, is a co-sponsor but has listened to the corporate siren song and worked with lobbyists to weaken his own bill.
Showing his true colors as a puppet of the billionaire and corporate class in America, he has backtracked on measures of his own bill that would have imposed penalties for corporations that ignore the law. He made a big publicity campaign about his original support for the Sherrod Brown bill but is keeping quiet now about his backing down on promises he made to the people of East Palestine shortly after a derailment there poisoned their town.
Meanwhile, the nation’s rail unions are again urging Congress to enact a federal law forcing the nation’s big Class I freight railroads to put safety over profits.
But while some House Republicans, notably House Railroads Subcommittee Chairman Troy Nehls, R-Texas, are sympathetic to the idea, as are almost all House Democrats, others—notably House Transportation Committee Chairman Sam Graves, also R-Texas—aren’t.
Graves says that despite the safety violations and other flaws uncovered by last February’s Norfolk Southern freight derailment, fire, and release of a toxic chemical cloud over East Palestine, Ohio, he doesn’t expect a rail safety bill from his committee this year.
That doesn’t stop the rail unions from, time and again, telling lawmakers they must force the big rail firms to put safety and people over profits.
“Over the last ten years, due to pressure from Wall Street, the Class I railroads pursued an operating model known as ‘precision scheduled railroading,’ or PSR,” Smart Transportation Division Legislative Director Greg Hynes told the Railroads subcommittee on July 23.
“Fundamentally, PSR seeks to generate the highest possible profits through the lowest possible operating ratios,” by cutting expenses as a percentage of revenue.
Put profits ahead of everything else
“Under PSR, quarterly profits are the most essential goal over anything else, including safety.
“From the perspective of railroads making money, PSR is a wild success. The Class I railroads have achieved record profits of over $196 billion between 2015 and 2023. In nominal terms, these profits are even more than what the railroads made at the height of their robber baron days in the 19th century.“
But if Congress won’t force the big rail carriers to carry out safety measures, the Federal Railroad Administration, which oversees the industry, might. It issued its own report on the East Palestine disaster on July 19.
And buried deep within that announcement was the information that FRA “initiated 12 enforcement cases with 117 counts against the railroad and other entities.” They’re all civil suits, and they’re separate from the settlement Norfolk Southern reached with East Palestine area residents, for almost a billion dollars, to cover damages, health care costs, and cleanup costs.
Details of the enforcement cases “are not public at this time” because they “remain ongoing,” Warren Flatau, the agency’s deputy public affairs director, emailed to People’s World.
Federal law, he elaborated, “allows parties the opportunity to respond to potential violations” of federal safety rules, first. Disclosure of final outcomes comes later, in FRA annual reports.
Even with that caution, the FRA said it found “potential violations…across technical disciplines examined by FRA inspections, such as operating practices, which ensure internal railroad rules are communicated to workers and followed, as well as motive power equipment, which includes the mechanical elements such as locomotives and freight cars.”
However, FRA did not address the profit motive or the one-third cut in rail inspectors in the last decade.
All of which tossed the issue back into congressional laps. And the legislative directors Greg Hynes of the Smart-Transportation Division and David Arouca of the Transportation Communications Union/ IAM pulled no punches in declaring lawmakers must force the Class I railroads to put people—and safety—before profits and dividends sent to Wall Street financiers.
Inspections of rail cars for potential safety problems—such as the cracks that preceded the overheating of an axle, which broke and then sent dozens of Norfolk Southern cars off the tracks in East Palestine—are rushed, said Arouca.
An inspector must cover at least 90 points on each side of a railcar. The Class I freight railroads, Arouca told lawmakers, force inspectors—the carmen—to eye all those cars in an average of a minute and 38 seconds if an FRA inspector watched, and 44 seconds per car if there’s no oversight.
That includes inspecting brake shoes, brake hoses, couplers, between cars, wheel flanges, and bearing failures. The freight car whose axle overheated and broke, causing the East Palestine disaster, hadn’t been inspected at all, other witnesses told lawmakers.
Difficult to decide what to inspect
“Sadly, in today’s era of railroading, many Carmen have to make the difficult decision of what to inspect. Under impossible time pressures, Carmen are simply unable to perform full inspections. Some just try to inspect mechanical components or other major derailment-causing defects. Others only inspect the Safety Appliances–critical components to ensure that train crews can safely perform their duties.
“Carmen are making the conscious and difficult decision to protect either their fellow railroaders or the general public. It should go without saying: nobody should have to make that choice.”
“For the men and women that fill the ranks of America’s freight trains, rail yards, and maintenance facilities, the mushroom cloud that contrasted the Ohio winter sky was an accident long in the making. The unfortunate reality is that today, in the wake of that disaster, very little has changed,” added Smart-TD’s Hynes.
“I want to emphasize this point: Despite the Class I rail industry coming under heavy scrutiny following the East Palestine derailment, they have done next to nothing of consequence to change their operating practices to make them safer.
“If anything, BNSF and the Union Pacific doubled down on the dangerous practices that contributed to” the East Palestine crash “and many others.” Hynes included an FRA chart showing 2022 and 2023 as the two worst years for safety in the last decade on the big freight railroads, measured in accidents per rate-mile.
“Every day, we see train derailments and other safety incidents happening in rail yards and on mainline tracks all across America. The unfortunate reality is these accidents can pose significant safety risks and disruptions for workers and residents alike. Sometimes, they can even be deadly.”
In July alone, a 27-year-old Smart-TD conductor was killed in an accident near Chicago. Days before that, Hynes added, “There was a train derailment resulting in a hazardous materials leak and fires in the pristine lands of North Dakota” from a Canadian Pacific-Kansas City Southern train and a Norfolk Southern worker suffered “a double amputation in Norfolk, Va.
“There have been more than 1,500 train accidents since East Palestine, and the industry is averaging about 1,000 derailments a year. It is by pure luck these train derailments or accidents have not risen to the catastrophic levels of East Palestine. Given the current operating practices…the unfortunate reality is that another East Palestine could happen tomorrow in your community.”
And since the feds don’t have enough inspectors, and since railroad brass push profits over people, most rail accidents and near-misses “are not investigated,” said Hynes.
“The reality is the rail companies themselves must take on greater responsibility to improve safety in the very industry that makes them so profitable.”
The subcommittee invited the CEOs of the four big freight railroads to testify. They refused.
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