Thoughts from the locomotive cab
By now, almost every angle of the Feb. 3 train derailment and toxic chemical release in East Palestine, Ohio, has been explored and analyzed. The cause — an overheated roller bearing on the end of an axle — is easy to isolate. Contributing factors are harder to pin down, but that’s now the mission of National Transportation Safety Board investigators.
The train crew wasn’t at fault, nor were the rails and roadbed. Whatever else people say about Norfolk Southern, the company’s track is among the best-maintained in the nation. But this incident, and others in the weeks since, have brought to light a host of safety and workplace issues that remain unresolved for the seven mega-railroads operating in the U.S. Already, lawmakers are crafting legislation, called the Railway Safety Act of 2023, aimed at tackling several issues, including overly long trains, protocols for handling toxic shipments and crew size.
After more than 30 years in another field, I switched to a career with Norfolk Southern as a freighttrain conductor from 2006 to 2014, and as a locomotive engineer from 2015 to retirement in 2018. Based in Harrisburg, I worked on routes stretching from North Jersey to Beaver County’s Conway Yard and from Philadelphia to Northern Virginia, including destinations in Baltimore and refineries in Delaware.
The loads those trains carried included coal from Waynesburg for power plants and export; John Deere tractors from Iowa; doublestack shipping containers from the Pacific Rim; new automobiles from Ohio; grain and ethanol from the Midwest; crude oil from the Bakken field in North Dakota; and, most aromatic of all, garbage from New Jersey headed for disposal elsewhere.
General-merchandise freights carry everything: durable goods like steel, lumber and pipe, as well as foodstuffs such as sugar, flour,
corn syrup, chocolate paste and frozen french fries. These general freights can also include hazmat loads designated as Toxic Inhala -tion Hazard or Poison Inhalation Hazard. Rules mandate that those cars be placed at least six behind the locomotive to provide a safety buffer for the customary two-member crew — engineer and conductor, plus sometimes a trainee or a brakeman.
If an accident occurs, the crew must promptly hand over paperwork identifying toxic chemicals to first responders. Crewmembers aren’t trained or outfitted to assist.
Dangerous loads must display four dinner-plate-sized diamondshaped signs, called “placards,” one on each side and each end of the car, identifying contents by a published color and number code. So before a train leaves, everyone connected with it knows about both the presence of toxic loads and their exact position in the lineup. Chain-of-custody rules govern when and where hazmat-carrying
trains can and can’t be parked en route. Most can’t be left unattended until they’re safely delivered.
Dealing with danger
Little known is that, under the interstate-commerce definition of “common carriers,” railroads can’t refuse to accept or move hazmat cargo. They can, and do, charge shippers premium rates for this service — but by law, they must haul them.
For my part, I was always especially alert if a train I was aboard carried chlorine gas, knowing that a 2005 derailment released clouds in Graniteville, S.C., that killed 10 people.
Even before the East Palestine wreck, the public was aware of the dangers of certain cargo. I was running a 100-car crude-oil train through a town near Harrisburg when the brakes went on, bringing everything to a stop. The conductor walked back to find the problem, which turned out to be an easily fixed air-brake hose connection.
But it takes time to inspect a train of that length, make the repair and get moving again. In the meantime, the train blocked several crossings for 45 minutes. Seeing a continuous line of stopped tank cars alarmed motorists, and
local police asked the conductor if they should evacuate. He reassured them that all was well and that we’d soon be on the move.
This points up a hot-button issue in freight railroading: The need for a two-member crew. The railroad industry is pushing to cut costs by reducing the on-board crew to a single person, the engineer. They propose to replace the traditional conductor, who is responsible for safety, paperwork and radio communications while the engineer while the engineer operates the train, with a roving utility helper driving a vehicle on nearby roads, to be dispatched to assist any train needing a hand.
This is a bad idea. Many times, a separate set of eyes on the lookout for trouble has averted danger. When an engineer’s view is blocked on a curve by trees or buildings, or by a train on an adjacent track, having a conductor to watch out is invaluable. If there’s a rockslide — NS’s route on Pittsburgh’s South Side is susceptible to this — or a trespasser on the track, only crew vigilance, not technology, can prevent an accident or lessen its severity.
As a student engineer, I was running a train in Delaware overnight when a daredevil kid parked himself and his bike on a crossing, playing chicken. The engineer who was training me saw the kid when I didn’t, and she jumped over to put the emergency brake on. He scooted out of the way just in time, but a freight train weighing as much as 15,000 tons can take a mile or more to stop. Fortunately, our train didn’t derail, which can happen due to the dynamics of weight and velocity duringa sudden emergency stop.
Profit above all
Extra-long trains, up to three miles in length, are a new development under the profit-maximizing operating plan known as Precision Scheduled Railroading. The theory is: Run very long trains with fewer crews to cut labor costs — and pay higher dividends. It’s almost a mirror image of the treatment of labor that caused the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, centered in Pittsburgh and other rail hubs.
In the short run, PSR produces record profits, but the resulting downstream operating delays, missed deliveries and other snafus are too numerous to list. Shippers and employees alike take the brunt of PSR’s unwanted side effects. This has prompted elected and appointed federal officials to haul railroad managers before them to explain how and why they abused the freedom granted by the federal Staggers Act of 1980, which deregulated the industry.
Finally, an unaddressed human fact of railroad life is excessive fatigue, amplified by an on-call, unscheduled lifestyle with erratic sleep patterns. An alert system at the controls is supposed to keep an engineer awake by requiring that he or she touch or move the levers every so manyseconds. Otherwise the system emits an audible alarm and, if that fails,it brings the train to a stop.
If the engineer gets drowsy or distracted early in that cycle, however, a lot can happen in that span before the brakes kick in. Again, an extra pair of eyes is priceless.
Even with all of this, railroads are far safer than moving the same tonnage over highways. But railroads, and lawmakers, can’t become complacent — and certainly can’t let maximizing profit be their only guide: As East Palestine shows, when something goes wrong on the rails, it can quickly become a catastrophe.