Major freight railroads are rushing railcar inspections, reinforcing known safety concerns raised by unions for years, but at a House hearing Tuesday they'll present new evidence from federal inspectors that railcar checks are routinely less than two minutes per car.
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.
