RWU
News & Information Service
Rail Workers Weekly News Digest
Number 18 - July 30th, 2019
Below is a series of articles compiled over the previous week.
They are of interest to railroad workers.
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2019-19  Article 1

Charges thrown out again in deadly Philadelphia Amtrak crash


PHILADELPHIA (AP) — For the second time, a judge threw out all charges Tuesday against an Amtrak engineer for his role in a high-speed derailment in Philadelphia that killed eight people, saying: “The law recognizes we’re all human.”

Common Pleas Judge Barbara McDermott rejected the involuntary manslaughter and reckless endangerment charges after Brandon Bostian’s lawyers argued that any mistakes he made did not rise to the level of a crime.

Two judges and the city’s district attorney have now concluded that no charges should be filed against Bostian over the 2015 wreck, which also injured about 200 people. Read more ...

2019-19 Article 2

Deadly 2018 Amtrak crash in SC caused by safety oversights, delays


COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — Federal safety officials ruled Tuesday yet another fatal train crash in the United States has been caused by easy-to-fix human errors.
The National Transportation Safety Board determined the crash of an Amtrak train into a parked train on a side track near Columbia, South Carolina, in February 2018 was CSX's fault. The board blamed the company for failing to implement a safety plan during track upgrades and its engineer not following specific steps including filling out paperwork to make sure he flipped a switch after parking the train to shift the tracks back to the main line.

The NTSB also ruled years of delays in implementing a safety system called Positive Train Control that would have automatically stopped the Amtrak train before it got to the switched track contributed to the wreck.

NTSB Chairman Robert Sumwalt said the irony of the South Carolina wreck is that to install the Positive Train Control safety system, workers had to turn off the red and green safety signals train engineers have used for decades to indicate whether train tracks have been turned off the main line. Read more ...

2019-19  Article 3

Act Now On Two-Person Train Crews, Mexican Cross-Border Issue!


The Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen (BLET) is urging all members to contact their Representatives and Senators in Congress to support the union’s two most pressing legislative issues: two-person train crews and foreign crews operating trains into the United States at the southern U.S./Mexican border.

In mid-July, 15 BLET State Legislative Board Chairmen came to Washington D.C. to join BLET Vice President and National Legislative Representative John Tolman, Director of Legislative and Political Affairs Bob Hagan and Director of Regulatory Affairs Vince Verna to lobby on Capitol Hill. The BLET representatives discussed these two vital issues with members of the U.S. House of Representatives and United States Senate. 

2019-19  Article 4

Final Two Class One Railroads Post Record Profits

(Editors note: For this quarter, all 6 publicly traded Class One railroads have posted a net decline in both freight traffic and employment, together with record profits. PSR is delivering for the stock holders while EVERYONE else suffers.)
Norfolk Southern


Canadian National

2019-19  Article 5

UK Engineers' union is campaigning for full electrification of Britain's railways

(Editor's note: perhaps the BLET and US unions might want to consider such a campaign, and get on board with Solutionary Rail!)


Cleaner, Greener, Quicker
 
Electrified rail is significantly less polluting than diesel. The country is facing a climate crisis, and an urgent need to decarbonise transport in line with the Kyoto and Paris agreements. Electrifying the railway could go a long way towards supporting this goal.
 
Carbon emissions from diesel trains are not just potentially harming to drivers and passengers, but can also affect people waiting in stations and communities living near to the tracks.
 
Electric trains also weigh less than diesel trains (because they don't need to carry tanks full of fuel). This means they can accelerate faster, reducing the amount of time needed for station stops, and the lighter trains cause less wear and tear to the infrastructure. This in turn saves money on repair and renewal costs.

2019-19 Article 6

US jobs growth bypasses railway workers

Once reliable source of blue-collar employment cuts back as wider labor market booms



(NOTE: to read the full article at this link you must subscribe)

US employment growth has bypassed the railroad industry, a provider of good wages for blue-collar workers across the country. Headcount at the largest US freight railroads was down 4 per cent on year to 141,000 in June, a lower number than in the financial crisis, government data show. The sum is set to fall further this year as managers streamline operations under pressure from investors.

Last week Union Pacific Railroad, the largest listed US railroad, said it intended to cut payrolls by 10 per cent in 2019 as it reported a record second-quarter profit of $1.6bn. At CSX, whose web of tracks lies east of the Mississippi river, employee counts were down 5 per cent on the year in June after a 14 per cent reduction last year. Executives seek another 2.5 per cent reduction between now and 2020.

The Norfolk Southern Railway, which reports results this week, has outlined plans to eliminate more than 500 positions this year.The prolonged cuts stand in contrast to  robust hiring  in the US labour market, where non-farm payrolls rose by 224,000 in June.

Railroad jobs are becoming more scarce as managers try to boost profit margins, in some cases to placate activist shareholders. Most operators have in the past two years embraced principles known as “ precision scheduled railroading ,” which entail rigid timetables, longer trains, thousands of idled locomotives and less labour. Driving trains, maintaining right-of-way and dispatching cars are largely unionised jobs that do not require a university degree. The average employee at a large freight railroad earned $87,100 in wages and $38,300 of fringe benefits in 2017, according to the Association of American Railroads.

The slackening rail employment picture has drawn scrutiny from Congress. A House transport subcommittee last month conducted a hearing on the state of the workforce. Lawmakers questioned the consequences of lower staffing.

“While worker productivity has never been better and Class 1 railroads have enjoyed multibillion-dollar profits for many years, employment levels are headed in the other direction with thousands of rail employees furloughed,” Dennis Pierce, president of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen union, told the  subcommittee .

Precision railroading was evangelised by  Hunter Harrison , a renowned manager who introduced it first on Canadian railways. After he was hired in March 2017 from Canadian Pacific Railway to run CSX, he swiftly began transforming the 21,000-mile network.

An acolyte continued to execute his vision after Harrison died in December 2017. Last week the Jacksonville, Florida-based company  reported  an operating ratio — operating costs as a percentage of revenue — of 57.4 per cent, its best for any second quarter.
CSX’s headcount was 21,541 in June, down by almost 10,000 since 2014.
2019-19 Article 7

Oil industry challenges a state law against moving volatile bakken oil by rail



The oil industry in North Dakota and Montana — home to the prolific Bakken Shale Formation — faces an “impossible choice.” That's according to a  new petition  to federal regulators from the attorneys general of North Dakota and Montana, in response to a Washington state law that aims to prevent trains hauling oil through the state from derailing and exploding.

That choice is to either remove the volatile components, such as butane, from Bakken crude oil before being loaded into rail tank cars, or send the volatile oil to other, harder-to-reach markets because — as the petition argues — removing the butane would cut into oil producers' profits, and almost 60 percent of the crude leaving North Dakota by rail goes to Washington refineries.

In addition the states assert that the Washington state law is preempted by existing federal rules governing hazardous materials and crude oil transport. The  new Washington law  sets a limit for the allowable vapor pressure — and therefore volatility — of crude oil moved by rail, or more precisely, of crude oil loaded or unloaded from rail cars in the state.

To achieve that limit, Bakken oil producers would have to remove the butane and other volatile components such as propane from its oil using facilities and infrastructure that would have to be built in North Dakota and Montana — something the attorneys general call a “prohibitively expensive undertaking,” an apparent sign of the industry's reluctance to make such an investment.  Read more ...
2019-19 Article 8

FRA proposes cameras in passenger locomotives to record employees


(Editor's note: This is the exact same FRA and its former rail CEO Ron Batory that just a few months ago withdrew the proposed rule making on train crew staffing and preempted the states from adopting legislation on two-person train crew minimums. This is also the agency that has ignored dozens of recommendations of the NTSB over the years which would have prevented numerous train wrecks and saved countless rail worker and passenger lives, had they been mandated).

The  Federal Railroad Administration  (FRA) earlier this week published a notice of proposed rulemaking for a new regulation that would require installation of inward- and outward-facing video cameras on all lead locomotives in passenger trains.

The image-recording devices would record while a lead locomotive is in motion and retain the data in a crashworthy memory module, according to a notice the FRA published July 24 in  the  Federal Register .

In addition, the FRA is proposing to treat the recording devices as "safety devices" under existing federal railroad safety regulations to prohibit tampering with or disabling them, according to the notice.

Also, the recorded data would be used to conduct operational tests to determine passenger railroad operating employees' compliance with applicable railroad rules and federal regulations, the notice stated. The FRA is seeking comment on the proposed rule until Sept. 23. 

Moreover, the FRA anticipates resolving the rulemaking without a public hearing. However, if - before Aug. 23 - enough people indicate that they are unable to present an opinion in written form, a hearing will be scheduled, the notice states.
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