Rail safety measure needed to prevent ‘ticking time bombs’ in rail yards, House members hear

Big rail companies’ obsession with increased profits is leaving a trail of carnage in American communities as well as in rail yards, lawmakers heard Tuesday. The list of victims includes the residents of East Palestine, Ohio, who continue to deal with the fallout of a toxic Norfolk Southern train derailment in February 2023. 

One union official described that disaster as a “wake-up call” ignored by the nation’s top rail operators, who continue to brush aside safety recommendations made by the National Transportation and Safety Board. The result? Derailments have increased since flames from wrecked train cars lit up the village of East Palestine on a frigid night 1½ years ago.

The union official’s comment came during a hearing on Capitol Hill in which members of the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure focused their attention on rail safety. A number of witnesses, and lawmakers, expressed their anger and frustration with the nation’s largest rail companies for cutting corners and sacrificing safety. The hearing gave lawmakers a chance to highlight the need to pass a rail safety bill that’s stalled in the House despite receiving bipartisan support.

“I refuse to let my constituents be treated like collateral damage” by railroad companies, said U.S. Rep. Chris Deluzio, D-Aspinwall, whose district includes Beaver County communities located near the Pennsylvania-Ohio border and just a few miles from East Palestine. He joined a number of other representatives in announcing the Railroad Safety Enhancement Act, which builds on the Railway Safety Act that Deluzio and New York Republican Nick LaLota introduced in 2023.

Deluzio said the new measure should provide momentum needed to get rail safety legislation passed.

“My constituents saw a toxic fireball fly over their houses after this derailment, one that shouldn’t have happened,” Deluzio said. Residents are “worried about the health of their families, worried about their drinking water, the air they breathe, the land they grow their crops on,” he said, “and Congress has yet to pass rail safety legislation.”

Union officials described a work environment that punishes railroad workers who find problems with rail cars. 

“The railroads do not want to know how defective their trains are,” said David Arouca, national legislative director of the Transportation Communications Union, which represents workers tasked with maintaining, repairing and inspecting freight cars.

That statement, he said, was based on years of watching rail companies systematically rig their operations to avoid and evade inspections that would identify problems. Rail companies have cut the time allotted for inspections and turn off detectors designed to locate problems “when the number of defects identified becomes too inconvenient.”

Workers, he said, are told by supervisors, “We’re in the business of moving freight, not fixing rail cars.”

The result is a culture of intimidation and retaliation in which those who report problems are penalized. In some instances, he said, workers have only 44 seconds to inspect cars. Rail yards are therefore filled with “ticking time bombs” — cars that may have undetected mechanical issues.

Arouca, like other speakers, stressed the importance of the rail industry. He emphasized that union workers want the railroad companies to thrive but do so safely. “Nobody has a greater interest in the success of the railroads than the people who work for them,” he said.

However, he said, those employees are sometimes forced to work so many overtime hours that they become too exhausted to drive home and therefore sleep in their cars.

The lack of rail safety continues to result in a wide swath of destruction involving communities and rail workers. Witnesses listed a few of the more recent calamities:

• On July 6, several rail cars carrying hazardous materials caught fire after a derailment in the North Dakota town of Bordulac, about 140 miles from Fargo.

• In March 2023, Louis Shuster, a 46-year-old Norfolk Southern conductor, was killed at a railroad crossing in Cleveland.

• Last April, Danny Brent Wilkins, 43, a Union Pacific track maintenance worker, died of injuries suffered while making track repairs in McNeil, Arkansas.

• Last week a rail worker lost two limbs in an accident in Norfolk, Virginia — that news came from Gregory Hynes of the International Association of Sheet Metal, Air, Rail and Transportation Workers.

Like Arouca, Hynes recognized the railroad companies’ vital role in moving goods and materials across the United States — for example, it’s much safer to transport hazardous materials by rail than by truck, noted one lawmaker.

Republican U.S. Rep. Michael Rulli of Ohio, whose district includes East Palestine, stated bluntly that “the state of our rail safety is a global disgrace.”

The derailment cost Norfolk Southern $1.1 billion — a figure that doesn’t include what he termed the “meager settlement” of $310 million announced in May by the Justice Department and Environmental Protection Agency.

“Who ultimately pays for this?” Rulli asked. “The American people, through increased costs of goods shipped over these rail networks — when my neighbors are already paying for this disaster with their health. I’ve seen their rashes, I’ve listened to their stories of doctor visits told to me with scratchy voices and sore throats. This is a slap in all of their faces.”

Rulli said he lives 15 miles from the rail disaster. His family continues to use bottled water. American rail companies were once the “crowning achievement” of the nation’s industry, he said, “but now simply exist as a nightmare” in the backyards of residents near rail lines.

Passage of the safety bill is necessary, he said, because rail companies cannot be trusted to regulate themselves. This was a point agreed upon by nearly everyone. At one point, Deluzio asked the witnesses one by one whether they thought the rail companies could effectively police themselves. All but one said no. The only dissent was an employee of the American Chemistry Council, who said he didn’t have enough information to say yes or no.

The point of the railroad safety bill is to improve the rail industry, not wreck it, said U.S. Rep. Seth Moulton, a Massachusetts Democrat.

The country’s largest rail companies were invited to the hearing but did not show up, “and that is shameful,” said U.S. Rep. Derrick Van Orden, a Republican from Wisconsin. “They have gotten out of control. They’re not responsible and not receptive to any type of input that I’ve seen, and it’s got to stop.”

Several speakers noted the weakness of DOT-111 tank cars, which are used to carry a variety of dangerous liquids and are prone to failure in accidents. More than half of the 16 DOT-111 tank cars involved in the East Palestine derailment released flammable liquids that caught fire as a result of the derailment. The rail safety act would move up the deadline for replacing or upgrading these cars from 2029 to 2025.

Although the rail safety act enjoys bipartisan support, it has stalled in the House due to Republican opposition.

The accident rate in rail yards has soared 50% in the past decade, said Jennifer Homendy, chair of the NTSB. More than half of the board’s investigations involve employees’ injuries.