U.S. Rep. Chris Deluzio, D-Fox Chapel, showed up Wednesday afternoon in Tarentum and stood next to a set of railroad tracks to remind everyone that, although Congress has entered a new session with new leadership, he’s still pushing the Railway Safety Act. This has been a cause for Deluzio since shortly after a Norfolk Southern train derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, in 2023, creating a toxic disaster that’s approaching its second anniversary.
What’s different now is that Donald Trump is in the White House and JD Vance, a former Ohio senator, is sitting in the VP office. Both have in the past slammed the Biden administration for failing to step up to help the people affected by the derailment.
Many of those residents are still trying to recover from the aftermath, and they’ve said since the burning railcars were still smoldering that they don’t want another community to suffer a similar fate. Passing legislation to make railroads safer would go a long way to making that happen, Deluzio said.
He used Vance’s own words to drive home this point. At a news conference before heading to the railroad tracks, Deluzio’s team placed in the background a poster board with this Vance quote from a year ago: “Railroad industry safety standards are getting worse … We can reverse the trend by passing the Railway Safety Act immediately.”
Vance brought Trump to East Palestine a few weeks after the Feb. 3, 2023, derailment, and Trump used the opportunity to call the Biden administration’s response a betrayal. This was a key moment in Trump’s journey back to the White House. In fact, a few months ago a senior Trump official noted on social media that the now-president’s visit to East Palestine after the derailment “really set the [Trump] campaign on a trajectory to victory.”
The question now is whether Trump, who has been championing deregulation, gets behind legislation to tighten the rules of railroads to make them safer. Norfolk Southern’s CEO doesn’t think so. He recently expressed optimism that the new administration will ease restrictions on the trains that roar through towns such as East Palestine and Tarentum.
Some people affected by the derailment — its impact spread much wider than the town itself and includes communities in Pennsylvania’s Beaver County that Deluzio represents — are anticipating the administration will soon do something for residents.
Why not start with the Railway Safety Act, Deluzio said.
“I think this is an opportunity for the president and the vice president to put action behind some of their words around rail safety,” he said. “Let’s get it done. The main obstacle I have dealt with has been congressional Republican leadership. I would love to see the White House, Vice President Vance in particular, to push their Republican colleagues to get this thing done.”
A big obstacle, he said, is the rail industry’s powerful lobbying arm, which has “carried a lot of sway with Republican leadership in the House.”
Deluzio said he sent a letter to Vance after the election, encouraging him to use his powers as vice president to lean on congressional Republicans to support the bill, but he has not spoken to Vance directly.
“This should not be a partisan fight,” Deluzio said. “I think folks who live along the tracks expect us to have a government that treats them with respect and that requires the railroads to treat them with respect as well.”
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After the news conference, Deluzio and a few local officials walked a few blocks to the railroad crossing at Corbet Street. Until a few months ago, pavement here was a nightmare of bucket-sized potholes. Tarentum Borough Council President Scott Dadowski would hear about it regularly. Residents would call him to complain that they’d blown out their tires at the intersection.
“We’d get calls, ‘Hey, my tire is broken, I’ve got a flat tire, when are you going to fix your railroad crossing?’” Dadowski said. “We couldn’t fix it; we didn’t have access to it.”
Norfolk Southern, which owns the intersection, finally acted in the fall, but it took the combined efforts of local officials and Deluzio to make it happen. “The squeaky wheel finally got heard,” Dadowski said.
The issues go beyond the hazards of rail crossings, Deluzio noted. Train length and the amount of time they block crossings present a public safety issue.
Tarentum Borough Manager Dwight Boddorf was standing next to Deluzio at the tracks. He piped up, “Well, and as a, you know, from a public safety standpoint, my biggest concern is that we have a water plant right down there, right by the railroad” — he pointed down the tracks — “and if something were to happen, God forbid, the impact that it would have in this region ….” He paused.
“You mean something like a derailment, like what happened in East Palestine?” a reporter asked.
Boddorf nodded yes. “Something like that would be catastrophic for this town and really the region because we supply water not just for this town but the town next to us.”
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One reporter asked Deluzio about Norfolk Southern’s $22 million settlement with the Village of East Palestine. That settlement was announced a few days ago. Deluzio said the railroad has an obligation to his constituents in Darlington, Pennsylvania, across the state line from East Palestine. They, too, were adversely affected by the derailment.
“I think the good people of Darlington ought to get something from the railroad, as well,” Deluzio said. He worked with Sen. John Fetterman and former Sen. Bob Casey, both Pennsylvania Democrats, to “secure federal funding for a public water option for Darlington and Beaver County and we’ve asked the railroad to cover the remaining cost that otherwise Darlington would be unable to meet.”
Steve is a photojournalist and writer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, but he is currently on strike and working as a Union Progress co-editor. Reach him at smellon@unionprogress.com.