The 53-car freight train that derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, last year was operated by a three-man crew, none of whom were able to prevent the cascade of mechanical and communications failures that led to the unfortunate accident.
In response to that accident, the federal Department of Transportation announced a new policy Tuesday requiring freight trains to operate at least with two people crews, a mandate that the Biden administration says will improve rail safety.
If you’re past first grade, you may now find yourself asking a rather simple question: Isn’t three more than two?
Rest assured that this is so. However, in Washington, the political calculus is often based on confusing calculations, heavily influenced by the push of special interests and a strong sense of “getting something done.”
Both are exposed in the freight railway’s new mandate. The derailment in eastern Palestine was serious and something must be done. That’s something, so now it gets done — and you get bonus points because doing this specific thing will please the Biden administration’s union allies, who have been pressuring the government for years to impose exactly this two-person crew mandate.
On Tuesday, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said it should be “common sense” that “large freight trains, some of which can be more than three miles long, should have at least two crew members on board.”
The length of the train has absolutely nothing to do with it, but Buttigieg hints that a second person on board could stop the train if the engineer was somehow incapacitated. And, in fact, it was a long-standing railroad practice to have more people in the cabin of freight trains for this very reason.
Nowadays, however, it is automation and not a support engineer that is responsible for a dramatic decline in rail accidents and injuries. Thanks to positive train control (PTC), essentially a computer-based override system that monitors speed and track signals to avoid collisions and that railroads have been mandated by Congress to use since 2008, train accidents have dropped by 30% %, while employee injuries increased. down 40% since 2000, according to data from the Association of American Railroads (AAR), an industry group.
Furthermore, Buttigieg’s claim about “common sense” jives neither with the specifics of the incident in eastern Palestine nor with recent government reviews of the two-person crew’s mandate.
The Federal Railroad Administration spent three years investigating a proposed two-person crew mandate before concluding in 2019 that the rule was not “necessary or appropriate for rail operations to be conducted safely,” largely due to safety advantages already obtained from automation. More recently, Congress considered – but notably did not adopt – a two-member crew mandate following the East Palestine derailment.
As for the East Palestine incident, having a crew of 10 driving the train probably wouldn’t have made any difference. The accident was caused by an overheated wheel bearing, which failed and derailed the train as the crew tried to stop it. The three-person crew should have been alerted to the problem earlier, but at least one trackside detector intended to spot the wheel problem wasn’t working properly.
Neither of these failures were the result of the crew on board the train, and neither point of failure would have been resolved by having other crew members on board the engine.
“Instead of prioritizing data-driven solutions to build a safer future for railroads, FRA is looking backwards and upending the collective bargaining process,” said Ian Jefferies, president and CEO of the AAR, in a statement on the new rules.
As Jefferies suggests, this looks a lot like an homage to the unions representing railroad employees. In the future, they won’t have to negotiate over how many crew members should be paid to sit in a freight train’s locomotive — they’ll simply refer to federal regulation.
This will create real costs for anyone shipping or receiving products by rail. A 2015 study funded by the AAR found that switching from two-person crews to one-person crews could save railroads $2.5 billion over a decade. Some of those savings are now likely to be eaten up by the cost of paying redundant crew members who don’t make trains safer or more efficient.
“The railroad employee unions promoting these laws have two primary motivations. First, the unions fear that train automation technologies will, over time, displace their dues-paying members. Second, they would like a government edict to replace an issue that is normally subject to collective bargaining negotiations between the union and railroad management,” wrote Marc Scribner, senior transportation policy analyst at the Reason Foundation (which publishes this website), in 2021. “On this “Last, it’s quite rational for unions to push for government favoritism in labor-management relations. But in the first case, forcing railroads to incur higher-than-market labor costs forever risks backfiring on members of the union reducing the long-term competitiveness of the railways.
And if you’re still not convinced that the two-member crew mandate has nothing to do with safety, here’s one last thing to consider. Amtrak — which operates trains that carry humans and therefore should be under the most scrutiny when it comes to safe operations — abandoned its two-crew mandate more than 40 years ago.