It’s not a train wreck. Nor even a derailment. It’s simply a merger between two rail lines. But to hear the grousing, it would be easy to believe that a crash is imminent.
The largest rail workers union is opposed to Union Pacific acquiring Norfolk Southern, creating a coast-to-coast freight network. The media are stoking fears that a monopoly is inevitable. “Experts” are alarmed that the larger company might increase rates. An “inhospitable regulatory environment” threatens the deal.
Deregulation has been a top priority for the new administration, and approving the merger could open the door to removing regulatory hurdles preventing the rail industry from modernizing.
The Federal Railroad Administration (FRA), an agency within the Department of Transportation (DOT), has been more of a hindrance to, than a force behind, innovation. The previous FRA administrator, Amit Bose, regarded it as “an employment agency for rail workers at the expense of productivity-enhancing innovative technology,” says Railway Age.
For instance, Bose firmly supported the requirement of two-man crews in freight trains while also standing in the way of automated track inspection, a safety-advancing technology in which autonomous track vehicles take measurements that manual inspections can’t match.
Today’s “track inspections regulations are as old as 8-track tapes,” says the Association of American Railroads. While we live in a world where “trucks drive themselves” and “drones deliver food,” freight lines “are forced to operate under the same visual track inspection regulations from 1971.”
Will the current administration be more open to innovation?
Bose confirmed charges that the FRA has been more dedicated to labor union interests than modernization and safety when he convinced DOT to mandate two-person rail crews. The SMART Transportation Division, the largest rail union in the country, “honored” Bose in January as he was leaving his post, expressing “its profound gratitude for his leadership and the lasting impact he’s had on railroaders across the country.”
Justified as a safety measure for both rail workers and passengers, the two-man rule “fixes” a cornerstone of inefficiency in the system. Yet the FRA has never offered any data to support it. The Alliance for Innovation and Infrastructure, however, looked at National Transportation Safety Board reports and dived into multiple FRA databases and found “there is insufficient data to justify a crew size regulation, and from what data we can discern, the rule is unwarranted.”
The FRA itself said – in 2009 – there was “no factual evidence to support [a] prohibition against one-person crew operations.”
A 2016 analysis of 14 years of data by management consultant Oliver Wyman found there was “no detectable differences in railway safety based on crew size.” In Europe, where single-person crews account for more than 95% percent of all train miles, the overall safety metrics are “as good as, or better than, operations with two-person crews.”
Tech advances have effectively rendered a second crewmember irrelevant. Positive train control (PTC) systems, for one, perform “virtually all of the work – that a conductor does sitting in the cab,” says retired Union Pacific CEO Lance Fritz. PTCs, says the FRA, “are designed to prevent train-to-train collisions, over-speed derailments, incursions into established work zones, and movements of trains through switches left in the wrong position.” The technology has been in operation across “all 57,536 required freight and passenger railroad route miles” since December 2020.
Positive train control systems have likely already saved lives. Two years before PTCs were system-wide, National Transportation Safety Board Chairman Robert S. Sumwalt “rattled off a list of fatal train wrecks that would not have happened had a device known positive train control (PTC) been put in place by the railroads,” while testifying before a House subcommittee, the Washington Post reported.
A number of fatal train wrecks in recent memory have occurred when there were more than the minimum two crewmembers on board, including the 2008 Chatsworth, California, collision that killed 25, and the 2013 derailment of a Bronx commuter train that took four lives. If crew size was crucial to safety, these accidents should not have happened.
Unfortunately, the Trump administration’s pick to run the FRA, the yet-to-be-confirmed David Fink, for years president of Pan Am Railways, is committed to the two-person rule. This is a missed opportunity. A better choice would have been a nominee who would carry out the deregulatory agenda.
It is long past time for DOT to move into the 21st century, and adopt a regulatory system aimed toward the future, not one stuck in the past. Failure to do so could mean devastating consequences for businesses, supply chains, and consumers. This merger is a golden opportunity for President Trump to unleash the economic power of a transcontinental railroad, and he should not allow unelected bureaucrats at DOT to strangle those efforts with red tape.
