Freight railroads must keep 2-person crews, according to new federal rule
Major freight railroads will be required to maintain a two-person crew on most routes under a new federal rule finalized Tuesday.
The Transportation Department’s Federal Railroad Administration released details of the rule Tuesday morning, after working on it for the past two years.
Since the fiery derailment in eastern Ohio in February 2023, there has been a lot of attention on rail safety, but few significant changes have been made other than the steps the railroads pledged to take themselves and the agreements they made to reduce nearly all provide employees with paid sick leave. Such changes include adding hundreds of additional track detectors and adjusting the way they respond to alerts from them. A rail safety bill proposed in response to the derailment has stalled in Congress.
Railroad unions have long opposed one-person crews due to a combination of safety and employment concerns. Major railways have had labor contracts requiring two-person crews for about 30 years, although many short-gauge lines already operate with one-person crews without any problems.
“As trains – many of which carry hazardous material – have become longer, crews should not be reduced,” said Eddie Hall, president of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen union. He praised the FRA for taking the step Biden promised, marking a milestone in Labor’s long struggle to retain two-person crews. Hall said keeping two people in the cab of a locomotive is critical now that railroads are relying on increasingly longer trains that are routinely miles long.
Railroads have sought the freedom to operate trains with just one person and move conductors to ground jobs where automatic braking systems are installed. It has been a key issue in industry contract talks for years, although the railroads abandoned the proposal just as 2022 negotiations neared the brink of a strike over concerns about workers’ quality of life.
The railroads argue that train crew sizes should be determined by contract negotiations, not regulators or lawmakers, as they insist there isn’t enough data to show two-person crews are safer. The norm on major railroads is a two-person crew, so current safety statistics reflect that reality.
Union Pacific tried last year to test how quickly a conductor in a truck could respond to problems on a train compared to the conductor aboard the locomotive, although the railroad never got that pilot program up and running. That plan would have kept two people at the controls of the trains during the test.
The derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, put railroad safety in the national spotlight due to the disastrous consequences of the hazardous chemicals released and catching fire during the crash that forced thousands of people to evacuate their homes and left them with lingering health problems.
But investigators have not suggested that the crew of that train did anything wrong. There were actually three people in it, because there was an intern on board. Instead, the National Transportation Safety Board has said the derailment was likely caused by an overheated wheel bearing on one of the train cars that was not detected in time by track sensors.
At least 11 states have already passed rules requiring a two-person crew, as officials worry that losing a crew member would make the railroad riskier and hurt the response to a rail disaster because a conductor wouldn’t be immediately available to help . States frustrated by the federal government’s reluctance to implement new rail regulations have also tried to implement train length restrictions and block crossings.
The industry often challenges state rules in court, although with this new federal rule it is not clear whether the railroads will resort to that tactic. The railroads generally argue in their lawsuits that the federal government should be the only one regulating the industry to ensure there is a uniform set of rules, and they wouldn’t be able to make that argument if they challenged the federal government.
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Associated Press writer Ashraf Khalil in Washington contributed to this report.