CLEVELAND — When Norfolk Southern CEO Alan Shaw appeared before the Ohio State Senate's Select Committee on Rail Safety Tuesday, he said he stood not in the way of but behind efforts to enhance rail safety.
"I'm going to take an industry-leading role here to continue to advance safety in the rail industry,” Shaw said. “I’m going to express a full-throated endorsement for many of the safety provisions that are in the Vance-Brown bill and in the Johnson-Sykes bill.”
The operative word is "many." While Shaw said he supports things like tougher tank car standards, advanced notification of first responders and increased investment in hotbox detectors, he has been opposed to the minimum two-person crew requirement. State Senator Nickie Antonio, who told Shaw she lives just five houses from the train tracks in Lakewood, pressed him about that.
"We're data-driven and we're going to follow the science,” Shaw said. “And at this point, I have not seen any data that provides a direct link between crew size and derailments."
Union leaders say that's not the point; the point is what two people can do when a derailment occurs that one cannot. One union leader told News 5 last month he believes because the East Palestine train had not only two crew members but a third trainee on board a greater tragedy was avoided.
"They separated the engines. They removed diesel fuel from the source of fire,” said John Esterly of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen. “They saved their own lives; they saved, potentially, lives of the citizens of East Palestine, preserved event recorded data. I mean, these are all of the things that the second crew member is there to do, and he was there to act immediately."
The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board sided with Shaw and the railroads this week stating, "Provision on crew sizes stands out for its potential burden and irrelevance to safety." That prompted an immediate op-ed response from Senator Brown asking, "Would you get on a commercial flight if the plane had only one pilot?"
"They think it's OK for one human being with one heart and one set of lungs to pilot a train that's 200 cars long, that's two miles long, that's an issue they lose on,” said Brown. So is this non-negotiable?
“It's not negotiable with the public,” he said. “I can't imagine the public will stand for these trains to be one person and I stand with the public on this."
But there will be negotiations because while the Brown-Vance bill requires two-person crews the Johnson-Sykes rail safety bill in the House does not. Whatever the final version looks like Senator JD Vance tells News 5 it will mean change.
"We've got to get it done; this is way too big of a problem for us to sit on our hands and do nothing,” Vance said. “Optimistically I don't think we're going to do nothing in this case. I actually think we're going to get a good bill through the Senate."
Vance said expects a committee markup on the bill, the last step before going to the full senate, by sometime in May.
"This legislation, while it's maybe moving slow by the standards of the private sector world that I came from, I think it's moving at a lightning pace here in Washington, D.C."
