Hearing into disastrous Norfolk Southern derailment in Ohio puts focus on rushed inspections due to years of job cuts

The unions have sounded the alarm often in recent years as the major railroads all adopted versions of the lean Precision Scheduled Railroading operating model and collectively cut roughly one-third of all their workers. Labor groups like the Transportation Communications Union, which represents the expert carmen who are supposed to inspect railcars, have said all the cuts have led to rushed inspections that miss problems and prompted railroads to rely on train crews too often to do limited inspections.

The disastrous Norfolk Southern derailment last year in East Palestine, Ohio, that prompted Tuesday’s hearing was caused by an overheating bearing that wasn’t caught in time by trackside sensors. The National Transportation Safety Board didn’t speculate in its final report released last month whether an inspection in a railyard might have caught the failed bearing, but it did point out that the railroad never inspected the car after it picked it up in St. Louis even though it crossed through several railyards before the crash. And more than 25% of the cars on that train had defects despite being inspected beforehand.

The TCU union’s National Legislative Director David Arouca says inspections are happening less often and with less time these days because of all the job cuts.

“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,” Arouca said.

There are at least 90 points on each side of a railcar that are supposed to be checked in an inspection — something that Arouca said can’t be done in the time allotted today. The Federal Railroad Administration study found that the major freight railroads allowed an average of 1 minute and 38 seconds per car while a federal inspector was watching, but documents showed that when an inspector isn’t there inspections are being done in about 44 seconds per car.

The FRA isn’t ready to say that the railroads’ current operating model is unsafe because more research is needed to determine whether that is the case. But FRA Administrator Amit Bose said railroads’ “safety performance has stagnated over the last decade — and by some measures, deteriorated. Despite assertions to the contrary, derailment rates for our nation’s largest rail companies have not significantly improved.”

And even though most derailments don’t cause anything like the massive black plume of smoke and lingering health worries that followed the East Palestine derailment — because many of them happen at slow speeds without spilling toxic chemicals — Bose said smaller derailments shouldn’t be dismissed as the railroad equivalent of a fender-bender because they can still be deadly.

None of the CEOs of the major railroads — which include Norfolk Southern, CSX, Union Pacific, BNSF, Canadian National and CPKC — were at the hearing, even though several of them were invited. Wisconsin Rep. Derrick Van Orden said it’s shameful none of the CEOs were willing to show up.

The railroads maintain they are committed to improving safety and have taken a number of steps since the East Palestine derailment including adding hundreds more trackside detectors to spot mechanical problems and reviewing the way they respond to temperature alerts from those devices.

Plus, the Association of American Railroads trade group continues to point out that even with derailments — which happen across the country roughly three times a day — railroads remain the safest option, with more than 99% of all hazardous chemicals arriving safely. But as the Ohio derailment shows, even one derailment can be disastrous if chemicals spill and catch fire.

Railroads also argue that new technology they are investing in can help supplement the visual inspections that workers do and spot problems while trains are moving down the tracks.

But Greg Hynes with the SMART-TD union, which represents conductors and is the largest rail union, said “in the accident’s wake little has changed.”

Ohio’s two senators — including Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance — led a bipartisan group in proposing a sweeping rail safety bill last year that included requirements for inspection standards and rules for those trackside detectors, but that bill stalled after it advanced out of committee and never got a floor vote.

Republican Rep. Troy Nehls, who leads the House subcommittee on railroads, recently introduced a similar, broad bill along with Democratic Rep. Seth Moulton. But most Republicans appear to want a more limited approach based on the findings of the NTSB investigation. A narrower bill hasn’t yet been introduced.

On Tuesday, Republican Rep. Sam Graves, the chair of the Transportation Committee, said he does not think any rail safety legislation was necessary to address the problems that led to the 2023 derailment. He added that a bill would not be emerging from his committee.

But the Chair of the NTSB Jennifer Homendy suggested that Congress should accelerate its phasing out of the older DOT-111 tank cars that are prone to rupturing in a derailment and then look at addressing the more than 200 other outstanding recommendations her agency has “repeated and repeated and repeated with zero action by the railroads and by some regulators.”

In addition to all the rail safety concerns, the NTSB said Tuesday that it is worried that a federal effort by the Drug Enforcement Administration to reclassify marijuana as a less serious drug could prevent train crews, pilots and other transportation workers from being tested for marijuana even though it could impair their judgment.

The NTSB said that eliminating marijuana testing for transportation workers “would create a safety blind spot that could endanger the public.”