Rail expert: 'The freight industry has become a mess'
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In a Yahoo Finance interview on the Norfolk Southern Corp. (NSC) train derailments, Former Oregon Congressman and House Transportation & Infrastructure Committee Chairman Peter DeFazio insisted it’s high time the United States update its freight system.
“This industry needs to enter into the 21st century. They won't do it willingly because it might hurt their stock price if they made these safety investments,” DeFazio recently said (video above). “So the feds are gonna have to push them.”
Early last month, a train derailed East Palestine, Ohio, exposing nearby residents to toxic chemicals. Then, a second Norfolk Southern train derailed in Springfield, Ohio. The company said that no toxic chemicals were released in the second crash.
Defazio explained that the accidents stem from “precision scheduled railroading,” in which companies run trains of excessive lengths while cutting back on maintenance crews.
“It's been something that I've been critical about for about a decade, and it's time that the feds, both at the Federal Railroad Administration and the Surface Transportation Board, were given new tools by Congress to rein in what's going on in this industry,” DeFazio said. “The freight industry has become a mess.”
In response to the accidents, Norfolk Southern released a six-point safety plan that listed several ways the company plans to improve freight line safety. Such initiatives included several ways to to improve hot bearing detectors, devices that use signal dysfunction in railcar components.
But Defazio, who retired from Congress last year, argued that hot bearing detectors were insufficient for preventing derailments.
“We're using very primitive technology here. The braking system was invented in the Civil War era. You know, the hot-box detectors to find failing wheel bearings are not regulated, and they're quite primitive,” Defazio said. “You should have vibration detectors, real-time vibration detectors which could get bearings long before they're getting to the point of failure, so you wouldn't have these massive derailments.”
As recently reported by CNN, a 2019 study funded by the Department of Transportation found that measuring both vibration and temperature was the optimal way to avoid accidents.
Last year DeFazio introduced a bill, called the Freight Rail Shipping Fair Market Act. The bill would have increased the authority of Surface Transportation Board (a federal agency that is responsible for regulating the freight rail system) and helped them improve safety on the freight lines, according to Defazio.
He also said the bill help would have helped the economy by lowering consumer costs. The bill would have curbed rail rate increases, which force customers to pay more, among other provisions. DeFazio asserted that the legislation failed to garner support from Republicans.
“So Congress should begin with some really strong oversight and then pass legislation in both those areas to help the administration deal with this,” he said. “Right now the administration doesn't have the greatest tools.”
Dylan Croll is a reporter and researcher at Yahoo Finance. Follow him on Twitter at @CrollonPatrol.
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