‘It’s Going to End Up Like Boeing’: How Freight Rail Is Courting Catastrophe – Workers are sounding the alarm that drastic cuts in employees and maintenance in order to increase profits are tempting fate.
Just before 5 a.m. on August 2, 2017, Alice Murray was fast asleep when her entire house shook, almost as if a freight train had crashed into the block, she told the Cumberland Times-News. That’s exactly what happened.
About 30 yards away, just off Cleveland Street in Hyndman, Pennsylvania, 33 cars in a 178-car freight train belonging to CSX Corporation derailed. The train crashed into one house and damaged two others. The entire town had to be evacuated. Miraculously, no one was killed.
As scary as the derailment in Hyndman was, it could have been much worse. Of the 178 cars on that train, 70 contained hazardous material, including 15 of the derailed cars, according to a National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) investigation. Luckily, just three of them—which contained molten asphalt, molten sulfur, and propane—either leaked or lit on fire.
The town was evacuated because molten asphalt, if released, can create vapors that, according to the NTSB, are an “explosive mixture with air.” Some of the other derailed cars contained liquified petroleum gas, and one car that did not derail contained Sodium Chlorate, which is potentially poisonous to inhale.
Like plane crashes, freight train derailments are rarely the result of a single failure. Many different things have to go wrong. Also like air travel, freight trains are a highly regulated form of transportation because of the potential for catastrophe.
And yet, freight train derailments are surprisingly common. In 2019, railroads reported 341 derailments on main line track, meaning the parts of the rail system not in yards or other work areas. Of those 341 derailments, 24 were freight trains carrying 159 cars of hazardous material, according to data the railroads voluntarily submitted to the Federal Railroad Administration. Even local news reports provide an alarming window into how frequent derailments are that people actually notice. While reporting this article, freight trains derailed on February 15 in Illinois, February 23 in Pennsylvania, March 3 in California, March 7 in Alabama, and March 11 in both Wisconsin and Minnesota.
None of these derailments resulted in any reported injuries. But according to Greg Regan, President of the Transportation Trades Department, a labor organization consisting of 33 transportation unions, these are red flags. “If you have increases in the less significant or catastrophic derailments,” Regan said, “it reflects a degrading safety culture, and certainly leads to oversights and an environment that could lead to the more disastrous types of derailment that again grab the headlines.”
To be sure, even on well-run freight railways or rigorously regulated airlines, accidents still happen. And at first glance, the derailment in Hyndman appeared to be just another accident. NTSB investigators found the train derailed largely because of a combination of improper braking procedures and the empty cars being in the front of the train. Long trains have an accordion effect where they expand and contract as they brake and accelerate. Empty cars brake faster than heavy ones, and if the empty cars are in front, the full ones will push against them, possibly forcing the empty cars up and off the tracks.
This is not a new problem. How to properly and safely space empty rail cars amid long freight trains and how to brake so as to minimize derailments are some of the oldest and most basic safety protocols in rail operation. And those protocols, along with other rules and practices meant to ensure as safe a rail network as possible, are now being ignored for the sake of profit.