INDEPENDENCE, Ohio — The Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen has called on the Federal Railroad Administraton to issue an emergency order setting a 7,500-foot maximum length for trains on Class I railroads, the union announced today (Monday, Oct. 16).
The BLET said in a press release that the union’s national president, Eddie Hall, had made the request in an Oct. 9 letter to FRA Administrator Amit Bose.
The letter asserts that train size and length “played an extensive role” in recent derailments, citing Norfolk Southern incidents in Anniston, Ala.; New Castle, Pa.; and East Palestine, Ohio, as well as a CSX derailment in Hyndman, Pa. (National Transportation Safety Board investigations are ongoing on the three NS incidents; the NTSB report from the Aug. 2, 2017, incident in Hyndman cited CSX’s train-building methods, but did not specifically address the train’s 178-car length.)
Hall wrote that railroads have increased train length “without training locomotive engineers to handle these monstrous trains properly” or considering route infrastructure. “Best practices do not exist” for operating such long trains, he wrote. With railroads running longer trains under the Precision Scheduled Railroading model, “excessive buff and draft forces have been created due to excessive train length,” leading to more derailments because of in-train dynamics.
Hall’s letter notes that the FRA issued a safety advisory on train length and makeup in April [see “FRA issues safety advisory …,” Trains News Wire, April 8, 2023, and “Labor leaders welcome FRA’s train makeup safety advisory …,” April 11, 2023], but says that does not go far enough: “A regulatory standard is needed, but those take a very long time. For this reason, we are request an Emergency Order.”
The union also sent a copy of the letter to all Class I railroads, asking them to voluntarily impose a 7,500-foot train length, Hall wrote, adding, “We do not want to wait until the next rail catastrophe to act.”
The FRA is a toothless bulldog who won’t do anything unless forced to. We all know that train length is a major problem. Forcing them to accept 7500 or 8500 feet will never happen until congress or the USDOT codifies it as law. Restricting railroads train length to the longest siding length on each route would work as an interim rule but the railroads would just lengthen one siding to,15,000 feet or so to get around that. Its time for the government to quit kicking the can down the road and actually do something or more East Palestine’s will become the norm as the RR’s pursue the almighty dollar and low Operating Ratio. no matter what they profess to be doing. Irregardless of how many locomotives they have in storage, does anyone really believe they will actually hire the necessary crews as long as they can get by (in their minds) without them? Force and government action are the only things they fear and if Congress doesn’t act, then the railroads know what they can do… any thing they want!
I was not aware of any major derailments where internal train dynamics were the sole cause of that derailment. Too bad an appendix to the letter did not list samples of such accidents. Train breaks due to dynamic forces may have risen, though.
On engineer training, I agree that this should be in depth and up-to-date.
I find it interesting that the BLET logo shows two horses. Is that just history or a subtle wish to return to simpler times. Lots of horses controlled by a throttle today.
Roger,
The two horses logo is from the Teamsters Union of which BLET is a member of.
Charlie
Well, that will mean more trains, the RR’s have the locomotives (stored) but do they have the people to operate said trains? Regardless of length safety needs to be more than just a buzz word.
According to AAR, there is no standard definition of a “long train.” Recent legislation defines a long train as 7,500 feet. In 2021, the median length of a train on Class I railroads — meaning half were longer, half were shorter — was 5,400 feet. Just 10% of trains were longer than 9,800 feet, and fewer than 1% of trains were longer than 14,000 feet.
Dr. Güntürk Üstün