More than six months before February’s toxic train derailment, a union representing Norfolk Southern Corp. employees in Ohio warned federal regulators that the railroad repeatedly disregarded its own safety rules for screening trains.
A formal complaint to the Federal Railroad Administration alleged the railroad had disregarded internal company rules requiring trains hauling hazardous materials be stopped and inspected in certain cases where track-side sensors, known as defect detectors, aren’t working properly. Those same sensors are a focus in the investigation into the Feb. 3 wreck.
“Apparently crews are being told to operate as described in the complaint almost everywhere in Ohio,” Clyde Whitaker, Ohio state legislative director for the Transportation Division of the International Association of Sheet Metal, Air, Rail and Transportation Workers, wrote in the complaint. Norfolk Southern “is taking risks with employee and public safety and it must stop.” A copy of the July complaint, which hasn’t previously been reported, was viewed by Bloomberg News.
Norfolk Southern defended what it called its “extensive wayside detection network” in a statement to Bloomberg Tuesday but didn’t specifically address the union complaint. Last year it screened bearings 2.2 billion times, according to company data. In addition to cars that were taken out of service with overheated bearings, the company also looks at trends that can indicate failures before the sensors issue alarms, it said.
The union complaint raises new questions about the way the railroad inspected wheel bearings and the limitations of the sensing equipment that railroads have voluntarily installed for monitoring. Norfolk Southern Chief Executive Officer Alan Shaw is slated to appear before a Senate panel Thursday where lawmakers are set to grill him about the train crash.
Sensors designed to spot overheated, failing bearings didn’t warn engineers until the temperature had spiked to a critical level, just before train cars began jumping off the tracks last month in East Palestine, according to the National Transportation Safety Board. Norfolk Southern has claimed the sensors were working properly prior to the derailment, which sent 38 rail cars off the tracks. Nearly a dozen contained hazardous materials such as vinyl chloride — considered a carcinogen — as well as ethylhexyl acrylate and isobutylene.
Investigators are looking at how the sensors functioned in the accident and whether the standards for their use are adequate, NTSB Chairwoman Jennifer Homendy said in a recent briefing. The sensors aren’t required by law, though legislation introduced in response to the crash would require their use every 10 miles for trains hauling hazardous materials.
In his complaint filed last summer, Whitaker outlined a June 24 incident where a 241-car train — more than two miles long — hauling hazardous materials stopped on a defect detector on Norfolk Southern’s mainline in Ohio. Since the devices only work on moving trains, an inspection was required, Whitaker said. A company dispatcher told the conductor there was no need to “walk the train,” a timely in-person inspection performed by the crew, contending a passing Amtrak train could do it instead. The union called that alternative inspection an unsafe practice.
The crew should be “looking for derailed equipment, leaking cars, hot bearing, sticky brakes, which all require visual, smell,” Whitaker wrote in the complaint. “You cannot perform a thorough inspection with the way this proceeding issue occurred.”
In a second incident two days later, a dispatcher told the crew of a train that had encountered a defective sensor not to stop and the next passing train would do a moving inspection instead — a violation of internal rules that require a train in that situation to stop for a “roll-by” inspection by another train at speed of 10 miles per hour or less.
The FRA wrote in its Aug. 11 response to the union that it doesn’t regulate railroad operating rules unless they are mandated by federal regulation. It added Norfolk Southern was conducting its own investigation and may provide more training “if they deem the dispatchers or chief dispatchers were making poor decisions.” The FRA declined to comment on the union complaint, calling the investigation ongoing.
The FRA last week issued a safety alert urging railroads to improve how they review sensor data in an attempt to prevent other accidents. Norfolk Southern on March 6 said it is increasing the number of sensors on its track network and adding new technology to improve screening.
