Railroads and their regulators thwart safety fixes, costing lives

Human errors and track defects caused more than 3,000 rail accidents over the last decade, killing 23 people and injuring nearly 1,200. Yet federal railroad regulators failed to implement most of the safety recommendations that emerged from accident investigations.

That’s according to an original analysis by the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism at the University of Maryland.

Behind those numbers, the Howard Center found, is a powerful industry that uses its money and influence to stymie federal safety reforms. It’s actively lobbying President Donald Trump’s administration to further reduce track inspection and repair requirements and loosen rules aimed at preventing crew fatigue.

The center’s analysis of data from the National Transportation Safety Board, which investigates major accidents and recommends safety improvements, found it gave federal railroad regulators 81 recommendations from 2015 through 2024. The Federal Railroad Administration has only fully implemented five of them — the lowest rate of any regulatory agency in the Department of Transportation.

Three of the lingering safety recommendations came out of a 2021 derailment of Amtrak’s Empire Builder passenger train in Joplin, Montana.

Zach Schneider, 28, was watching Montana’s Great Plains roll by from the observation car of the long-distance train. Margie and Don Varnadoe, on a trip to celebrate their 50th anniversary, were walking between cars. All three were thrown to their deaths just before 4 p.m. on Sept. 25, when the train derailed, injuring 49 people.

An investigation by the safety board blamed the tragedy in part on worn-down rail and other defects in the tracks owned by BNSF Railway — defects the company inspector likely missed due to his workload, according to the NTSB.

But board officials went further, citing the FRA’s failure to set rules for track replacement or workloads. The safety agency had already recommended both measures repeatedly after previous rail accidents.

FRA spokesperson Warren Flatau said in late September that the agency currently has 102 open safety board recommendations, some dating back as far as 1998, and “is currently taking action or planning to take action” on more than 70% of them.

He said the agency plans no immediate action on the rest, generally because officials have determined they are infeasible or can be addressed with existing regulations.

The FRA didn’t respond to requests for additional information on what actions it is taking.

To understand why rail safety initiatives have fared so poorly, the Howard Center examined the fate of safety reforms recommended repeatedly by investigators following major accidents over years, even decades.

The analysis revealed a recurring cycle of industry opposition, FRA inaction, congressional capitulation and tragedy.

The three major American freight railroads included in this story — BNSF, Norfolk Southern and Union Pacific — did not dispute any of the facts or findings. All sent statements saying they are committed to safety.

Deadly track defects

In 1980, a train carrying vinyl chloride — the same cancer-causing chemical at the center of the 2023 East Palestine, Ohio, train disaster — derailed in Muldraugh, Kentucky, causing two carloads of the flammable gas to spill and catch fire, and a third to vent toxic fumes. Four crew members were injured and about 6,500 people were evacuated.

Investigators concluded the accident was caused in part by dangerously worn-down rail, one of several types of track defects that, collectively, contribute to about a quarter of the rail accidents in the United States.

The safety board called on regulators to set a limit on how much wear a rail can sustain before it has to be replaced. But the FRA never addressed the issue. An FRA-sponsored study in 1998 found such limits would improve safety, but still it took no action.

In the 45 years since the Muldraugh derailment, 44 people have died and another 2,300 have been injured in nearly 15,000 main-line accidents blamed on track defects, according to the Howard Center’s analysis of FRA accident data.

The fatal Montana derailment occurred on one of the busiest long-distance tourist routes in the U.S., carrying more than 300,000 passengers each year between Chicago and the Pacific Northwest.

NTSB officials found the rail wear limits they recommended in the 1980s would have required BNSF to replace the rail involved in the accident.

A BNSF inspector had driven over the track in a company vehicle twice the week of the derailment and documented concerns about that section of track. But the inspector didn’t get out to walk the tracks, something the NTSB said likely would have identified defects. There had been no reported walking inspection in nearly a year.

In a statement, BNSF said it inspects its tracks in excess of federal requirements.

“This tragedy is a powerful reminder that there’s no substitute for robust track inspection practices,” NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy said in a statement after the investigation, imploring track owners to provide inspectors the time and resources to do their work effectively.

The safety board recommended again in July 2023 that the FRA regulate rail wear. A month later, the agency said it was “committed to working with NTSB to prevent future accidents and save lives” and that it “welcomes and will consider all recommendations that will further that goal.” The NTSB website showed no further response as of Dec. 18 from the FRA.

Meanwhile, the industry’s largest trade group is pushing to reduce human inspection requirements. In May, the Association of American Railroads, the trade group that represents the largest and wealthiest North American railroads, suggested reducing the frequency of required human track inspections in favor of additional automated inspections — a move it argued would “improve safety and reduce regulatory costs.”

On Dec. 5, federal regulators granted AAR’s request to let railroads do just that. The FRA approved a waiver that will allow participating railroads to cut weekly visual inspections in half, provided they comply with a number of new safety and reporting requirements.

The NTSB says automated inspections are a supplement to human inspections, not a replacement for them, in part because neither method is 100% effective.

BNSF said use of automation allows the company to detect and repair defects more quickly.

Lance Marston, a rail inspector for Norfolk Southern, said the technology excels at identifying certain track defects not always visible to the human eye, such as the rails being too far apart. But it isn’t designed to detect over two-thirds of rail issues human inspectors are trained to look for, including broken rails, according to data from the AAR and rail workers’ unions.

“There’s just no replacement for getting out there and putting boots on the ground,” Marston said.

Norfolk Southern said in a statement that automated inspection is just one part of its process and human inspectors play a “critical role” in evaluating the technology’s assessments.

Christie Lee, a track inspector for BNSF for the past two decades, said the introduction of automated inspections has meant fewer inspectors and higher workloads.

“We used to ride, like, 70 miles … and we used to have three track inspectors,” said Lee, whose territory now covers over 90 miles of track running from southern Wyoming and into Nebraska. “Now it’s solely on two guys, two people, to ride the whole thing.”

An inspector in a BNSF maintenance vehicle rode over the accident site in Joplin two days before the derailment and noted some track anomalies. But he didn’t stop to look closer and missed critical defects that led to the derailment, the NTSB found.

Safety board investigators surmised he probably didn’t have the time. That day, he had worked 16 hours inspecting 127 miles of track — “an excessive amount,” the NTSB said. Investigators faulted BNSF’s safety culture, finding the railroad hadn’t done enough to manage employee workloads.

Fatigued workers, the NTSB reminded the company, make mistakes. It was a message the board had repeated since at least 2004.

Fatal fatigue

In the pre-dawn hours of June 28, 2004, a Union Pacific engineer was operating on less than two hours’ sleep when he blew through a signal light and hit a BNSF train in Macdona, Texas. Over 9,000 gallons of liquid chlorine escaped from a punctured tank car, engulfing the area in a cloud of chlorine gas that suffocated the conductor and two local residents, and left 30 people in severe respiratory distress.

The engineer went to bed late the previous night after visiting his daughter and playing cards with a friend. His first shift that weekend had ended Saturday afternoon, but only 9½ hours later, he’d reported for a 12-hour overnight shift, which ended just before noon Sunday. At 2:45 a.m. Monday, he was called in to operate the locomotive that would crash less than three hours later.

The NTSB’s investigation found the engineer’s fatigue — triggered by a chronic lack of sleep, disrupted sleep cycle and long work shifts — led to the fatal mistake that caused the collision.

Like many freight train employees, the Union Pacific crew worked on-call, not on set schedules. Regulators give railroads broad discretion over crew scheduling, and employees are expected to adapt.

In a statement, the AAR said the “dynamic” nature of railroad operations “presents unique scheduling challenges.” The industry, it said, “continues to invest in tools, technology, and collaboration to support employee well-being and operational safety.”

But in its request to the Trump administration to roll back regulations, the AAR argued regulatory mandates aimed at preventing fatigue-related accidents are overly burdensome. The mandates, it said, create opportunities for employees to abuse fatigue-related protections.

The AAR declined repeated requests to provide examples of abuse or potential abuse of fatigue-related protections by employees.

“If I go back through my career as an engineer and I think about mistakes that I made, I can almost attribute all of them to fatigue,” said Scott Bunten, a general chairman for the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen, one of the two major rail unions.

In 2006, the safety board recommended the FRA better regulate crew scheduling practices. But the agency didn’t take action.

Less than two years later, as part of the Rail Safety Improvement Act, Congress mandated implementation of fatigue risk management plans in the freight rail industry. It also said railroads were responsible for screening employees for sleep disorders and providing fatigue training.

Only this year — after more than 15 years — has the FRA finished approving fatigue plans for all railroads.

Fatigue-related accidents killed at least nine people and injured over 300 from 2015 through 2024, the Howard Center’s analysis of NTSB investigation reports found.

Railroad workers have the option to take personal rest days to avoid fatigue, but the unions argue punitive attendance policies discourage this. Crew members told the FRA as part of a 2022 study that they often don’t report fatigue because they fear railroads’ retribution.

“They just want bodies on the trains, and honestly I don’t think they care if they’re fatigued or not,” former NTSB investigator Rick Narvell said.

Safety delayed, lives lost

The 50-year battle over adoption of positive train control, which automatically slows or stops trains if the crews do not, illustrates the industry’s playbook.

The NTSB first recommended the FRA consider requiring railroads to adopt the technology in 1970. Congress eventually stepped in following a rapid succession of tragedies in the early 2000s, including one in California that killed 25 and two in Arkansas and South Carolina that released clouds of poisonous gas, killing a total of 10.

The law set a 2015 deadline. But the railroads immediately began pressing Congress to postpone, spending millions of dollars on lobbying and campaign contributions from 2008 through 2015.

The campaign succeeded. Two months before the deadline, Congress pushed it to 2018, with extensions available for another two years.

The railroads finally achieved full compliance with the safety recommendation in 2020. By then, 154 preventable accidents had claimed 300 lives and injured 6,800 people, an internal NTSB tally showed.

In a statement, the AAR attributed the delay to the “complexity and scale” of technological development.

Regulatory wish list

When the Trump administration invited public input into how to shrink the federal bureaucracy this spring, the AAR responded within two weeks with a spreadsheet that itemized 80 regulations for modification or repeal.

It laid out an expansive deregulatory agenda that would markedly reduce federal oversight of an industry that carries billions of passengers and millions of gallons of toxic chemicals through thousands of communities.

Among the items on the AAR’s wish list: Repealing a requirement for minimum two-person crews and reducing administrative requirements for fatigue management plans.

In the accompanying letter, the trade organization stated its aim was to cut through regulatory red tape in a “manner that is consistent with railroad safety.’’

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University of Maryland reporters Mary Burke, Taylor Nichols, Adriana Navarro and April Quevedo contributed reporting and data analysis for this story.

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This story was produced by the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism at the University of Maryland, whose work is funded by a grant from the Scripps Howard Foundation in honor of journalism pioneer Roy W. Howard.