WASHINGTON — The National Transportation Safety Board is considering a request from Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer to expand its current investigation of Norfolk Southern safety practices to cover all Class I railroads, the Capitol Hill news site Roll Call reports.
Schumer (D-N.Y.) made the request earlier this month in a letter to NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy, about a week after the NTSB had announced its investigation of NS [see “Senator calls for NTSB to expand …,” Trains News Wire, March 15, 2023].
Roll Call reports that Homendy said after testifying at a Wednesday hearing of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee that the NTSB is considering the request, but that she needs to have further conversations with him to get more clarity about questions in his letter. That letter included six questions he wanted the safety board to consider, including if “deregulatory pushes have contributed to these derailments and increase in deaths” and whether railroads “have a culture of ignoring their own safety standards.”
An NTSB staff member told Roll Call that Homendy hopes to respond to Schumer’s letter “in the near future.”
As the NTSB has said many a time, safety regulations for all transportation modes are written in the blood of those who have died as a result of not following the rules in place or the lack of enforceable regulations to make CEO’s accept the concept of their being responsible for their people not following safety rules or common sense. Watch the show “Air Disasters” which documents aviation accidents and some train crashes (like the VIA Rail/Canadian Pacific Freight head-on crash in the 1986 at Hinton, Alberta) and you can see what I am talking about.
https://www.newspapers.com/clip/21942263/super-continental-crash-with-freight/
Didn’t EL’s NY100 and 2nd NY100 have schedules that they actually followed? Not on the timetable pages (they ran extra) but on separate “preferred freight” pages.
Back in the 1950s is a true example of precision scheduled railroads. They actually ran a lot of trains on a timetable schedule and offered a larger variety of beneficial services. And with much more precision. I don’t know where to find the information on the rate of derailments per train mile to compare with today, but I presume it was less.
My Senator is finally doing something worthwhile. There are only 2 ways railroad executives will do the right thing: stringent safety and service quality regulations or very expensive litigation resulting in huge payouts to those injured by the lax safety policies. Schumer’s letter links to a ProPublica article with information I hadn’t heard:
“Norfolk Southern declined to say whether members of the train’s crew received an alert before the derailment and, if they did, whether the help desk told them to disregard it. The company did not address questions about its policy giving its help desk leeway to ignore such alerts.”
Seems to be a key failure, whatever the “help desk” action or inaction was. Again, I’m hoping class action lawsuits bleed the bonus pool of railroad executives. The only thing these sociopaths understand and love is money.
According to FRA statistics, derailments on mainlines have been trending downward and derailments in yards have inched upwards. Before anyone speaks, including us, they should really get their facts straight. In this case Schumer should not have asked the following question when he said in his letter: “deregulatory pushes have contributed to these derailments and increase in deaths”, there has been no increase in deaths, at least those not related to idiot trespassers.
As for that ProPublica article, I read it, and I also read those same lines in other news articles in other railroad press, including this on right here. The part about the help desk having leeway to disregard the alert, which seems to be an industry wide practice from what I’ve read.
Do railroads “have a culture of ignoring their own safety standards”? Depends on who would be blamed if something bad happened and if they think that they will get away with it.
YEEESSSSSSSS they absolutely do. I can write a book here telling the corners cut. The only people held accountable and to a high standard are TYE employees period. Management absolutely cuts corners and has gotten people killed or seriously hurt as a result and no one seems to care or looks at the crafts as the problem every time.