CLEVELAND — Since the East Palestine train derailment and fire, America has received a quick lesson on the dangers facing the rail industry.
But locomotive engineers like John Esterly will tell you: "These are not new issues for us in the labor field, the crew size mandate and just safety, in general, are things we've been talking about for decades now."
Esterly is also with BLET, the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen.
The changes accelerated, though, in recent years, as railroads shifted to Precision Scheduled Railroading, or PSR, in an effort to streamline operations, said Jeremy Ferguson, President of SMART (Sheet Metal, Air, Rail, Transportation), one of the nation’s largest unions representing rail workers.
“It's unbelievable the changes in the last four years as PSR has taken hold,” he said. “The drastic reduction in manpower, the cutbacks on inspections of our railcars and our tracks and our locomotives. The push, push, push to do more with less. It's been devastating and it's finally starting to show that we're not going to be able to keep this supply chain moving if we don't give it the proper safety inspections and the maintenance and everything we need to keep it moving, including having two people on every freight train to ensure that safety as it rolls along 24 hours a day through all of these communities.”
Ferguson testified last year before Congress and told them “this was coming, that there was going to be something catastrophic that was going to be the end result of PSR."
Some of the changes that he and other rail union leaders have been calling for for years are now finally being included in the new bipartisan Railway Safety Act co-sponsored by Ohio Senators JD Vance and Sherrod Brown.
Brown met with Ferguson, Esterly and other union rail workers on Monday next to the Norfolk Southern tracks that run through Downtown Cleveland. The bill would set limits for the first time on train lengths and set standards for maintenance and raise standards for cars carrying hazardous materials. It will have a hearing next week in the Senate Commerce Committee. Brown knows they have to move fast while the public is still engaged.
"I'm not going to let the railroad's lobby slow it down, I'm not going to let the railroad's lobby's friends in the Senate slow it down,” Brown said. “So we're going to move as quickly as we can."
Another thing the bill does is mandate at least two-person train crews. That's something the East Palestine train had on Feb. 3; if they didn't, Esterly says, it could have been much worse.
“This is also a great example of the good. We had a multi-person crew in the cab of the locomotive in East Palestine,” Esterly said. "They separated the engines, they removed diesel fuel from the source of fire, 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."
