INDEPENDENCE, Ohio — The Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen has called on the Federal Railroad Administraton to issue an emergency order setting a 7,500-foot maximum length for trains on Class I railroads, the union announced today (Monday, Oct. 16).
The BLET said in a press release that the union’s national president, Eddie Hall, had made the request in an Oct. 9 letter to FRA Administrator Amit Bose.
The letter asserts that train size and length “played an extensive role” in recent derailments, citing Norfolk Southern incidents in Anniston, Ala.; New Castle, Pa.; and East Palestine, Ohio, as well as a CSX derailment in Hyndman, Pa. (National Transportation Safety Board investigations are ongoing on the three NS incidents; the NTSB report from the Aug. 2, 2017, incident in Hyndman cited CSX’s train-building methods, but did not specifically address the train’s 178-car length.)
Hall wrote that railroads have increased train length “without training locomotive engineers to handle these monstrous trains properly” or considering route infrastructure. “Best practices do not exist” for operating such long trains, he wrote. With railroads running longer trains under the Precision Scheduled Railroading model, “excessive buff and draft forces have been created due to excessive train length,” leading to more derailments because of in-train dynamics.
Hall’s letter notes that the FRA issued a safety advisory on train length and makeup in April [see “FRA issues safety advisory …,” Trains News Wire, April 8, 2023, and “Labor leaders welcome FRA’s train makeup safety advisory …,” April 11, 2023], but says that does not go far enough: “A regulatory standard is needed, but those take a very long time. For this reason, we are request an Emergency Order.”
The union also sent a copy of the letter to all Class I railroads, asking them to voluntarily impose a 7,500-foot train length, Hall wrote, adding, “We do not want to wait until the next rail catastrophe to act.”
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