Norfolk Southern to upgrade safety
Norfolk Southern announced plans on Monday to improve the use of detectors placed along railroad tracks to spot overheating bearings and other problems in response to a fiery derailment on the Ohio-pennsylvania border a month ago.
The announcement came the same day Pennsylvania’s governor announced that the company had agreed to pay several million dollars to cover the cost of the response and recovery in that state.
The company said it would evaluate the distance between “hot bearing” detectors — currently 13.9 miles on average on its core network — and promised to look at every location where the distance is more than 15 miles, deploying more detectors if practical.
Norfolk Southern “anticipates adding approximately 200 hot bearing detectors to its network, with the first installed on the western approach to East Palestine,” said the company announcement, which comes amid proposals from President Joe Biden’s administration and Congress aimed at improving safety following last month’s derailment.
The National Transportation Safety Board has said the crew operating the train that derailed Feb. 3 outside East Palestine, Ohio, near the Pennsylvania border got a warning from such a detector but couldn’t stop the train before more than three dozen cars came off the tracks and caught fire.
Half of the town of about 5,000 people had to evacuate for days when responders intentionally burned toxic chemicals in some of the derailed cars to prevent an uncontrolled explosion, leaving residents with lingering health concerns. Government officials say tests haven’t found dangerous levels of chemicals in the air or water in the area.
A week ago, a safety advisory from the Federal Railroad Administration urged railroads to reexamine the use of such detectors, making sure that they get inspected often enough that there are safe standards for determining when to stop a train or park a rail car when a warning is triggered. The railroad administration said overheating bearings likely caused at least four other derailments since 2021 and called for ways to analyze temperature trends from the sensors to help identify potential problems sooner.
Norfolk Southern also said it would work with manufacturers to speed up tests and deployment of new “multi-scan” detectors able to scan a greater cross-section of a rail car’s bearings and wheels. It also vowed to work with other railroads to review standards and practices, reevaluating the temperature triggering an alarm and the response to such alarms as well as analyzing data for patterns that could warn of safety issues.
Norfolk Southern also announced installation of more acoustic bearing detectors, which analyze the vibration inside the axle to identify problems. Norfolk Southern said it has five such detectors in service and will add 13 more on high-traffic routes.
The company also said it is working with Georgia Tech Research Institute to develop more advanced safety inspection technology and will join the railroad administration’s “confidential close call reporting system,” also citing its own program that “encourages railroaders to speak up if they see something that is unsafe.”
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg has proposed reviving a rule requiring upgraded, electronically controlled brakes on certain trains filled with flammable liquids that are designated “highhazardous flammable trains,” and possibly expanding which trains are covered by that designation.