To: Detroit/Seattle
Workers' Voice mailing list
March 10, 2023
by Pete Brown, Detroit Workers’ Voice
The train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio on February 3 has produced much discussion about its cause and what could be done to prevent future such disasters. Such discussion is healthy, many people expressing genuine concern for the residents of East Palestine, who will probably suffer long-term health effects of the train accident. Many early commentators were quick to condemn the rail companies’ grappling for profit as a cause and condemned their prioritizing profits over safety. Some of the specific charges made were a little off base, but the basic thread of their comments was correct. The railroad company, Norfolk Southern, is entirely responsible for the breakdown of its train. And the federal government is responsible for lax safety standards that allow railroads to go on running unsafe railways. A second derailment in Ohio barely a month after this – on March 5, near Springfield – by the same Norfolk Southern company – shows that these events are not mere accidents, but are regular occurrences caused by capitalist business practices reinforced by the “capture” of government regulatory agencies.
First, let’s settle the question of what caused the derailment. This has been clarified by a preliminary report on the accident by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) and further remarks by its chairwoman, Jennifer Homendy. The NTSB’s preliminary report on the accident is available online and is quite short. (1) It focuses entirely on an overheated wheel bearing as the cause of the accident. This was further emphasized by Homendy in a TV interview she did (2), in which she says the overheated wheel bearing was definitely the cause of the derailment. Homendy also sent out tweets in which she criticized early speculation about other possible causes such as the train’s braking system. The train’s braking system was working properly, and an emergency braking system was also triggered during the emergency; but by that time, the train had already derailed. In her interview cited above, Homendy pointed out that determining the basic cause of the accident is not that hard; the more important issue is, what led up to that? What caused the wheel bearing to overheat? What kind of maintenance does the railroad company do? How could the failing wheel bearing have been detected earlier and alarm bells sounded earlier? Good questions. With continued mass pressure, the NTSB may pursue answers to them.
Even now certain answers can be given to the questions Homendy posed. Obviously, the maintenance schedule maintained by Norfolk Southern was defective. Even if NS executives cry out that the maintenance they do “meets industry standards,” that’s not good enough. There are more than 1,000 train derailments every year in the U.S., and more needs to be done to prevent them. But the rail companies are actually cutting back on maintenance work and the workers needed to carry it out. Social media is full of anonymous comments by NS employees and ex-employees about maintenance cutbacks, and in this article (3) a railroad worker says she was explicitly told to ignore wheel bearing problems. (This worker was employed by Union Pacific, not Norfolk Southern, but it indicates what “industry standards” were.) The Dept. of Transportation has in the past mandated replacement of old rail cars by newer ones, as a safety measure; but that scheduled replacement was pushed back by Congress, to lessen the financial burden on railroads. This is a case of putting profits of rail companies ahead of public safety (more on this below).
Some railroad workers with knowledge of NS’s shoddy maintenance schedules and cutbacks of workers speculated, early on, that the problem might have been defective hot box detectors. A “hot box” is an overheated wheel bearing or axle. To detect these before they fail completely, some rail companies install detectors along the rails which measure the temperature of wheels and axles as they ride over. This temperature is then transmitted to the train itself, which triggers an alarm if the temperature reaches a certain critical threshold. All that sounds fine, but with one little problem: it is completely up to the individual railroad company how many of these hot box detectors they install, if any; how far apart they are spaced; and at what level to set the critical threshold. None of this is mandated by government regulation, nor are there any regulations concerning maintenance of hot box detectors. So it’s understandable why rail workers might speculate about whether NS’s hot box detectors were working.
As it turns out, they were present and in working order. The NTSB report clarifies that the guilty wheel bearing rode over one detector and measured 38 degrees higher than the ambient (outdoor surrounding air) temperature. Ten miles further, another detector measured the bearing at 103 degrees above ambient. The next detector was 20 miles further, and by that time the failing wheel bearing was a real hot box – 253 degrees above ambient. This is the hot box that onlookers and video cameras saw careening down the track, spewing sparks and fire. This set off an automatic alarm, and the conductor immediately applied brakes to bring the train to a halt. But before the train finally stopped, the bearing failed, with the resulting derailment.
This timeline shows obvious problems with the hot box detection system. The detectors need to be placed much closer together than ten or twenty miles, so that steep climbs in temperature can be detected sooner. Further – and this is the most glaring problem – the temperature threshold at which alarms go off needs to be lowered. Norfolk Southern puts its temperature threshold at 170 degrees. But by that time, with an overheated bearing about to break, it’s too late to stop the train. If an alarm had gone off at 103 degrees, there might have been time to prevent the derailment.
It should be noted, as the NTSB report clarifies, that human error played no part in this accident. The train’s workers, conductor and engineer, did exactly as they were supposed to, reacting to the alarm (once it sounded) and tried to bring the train to a halt. The problem lies with Norfolk Southern’s hot box detection system. And behind this, of course, is the government’s slovenly system of safety regulation. Hot box detectors have been around for a long time, but the federal government has not mandated their use, leaving it up to the railroad companies to decide if they wanted to save money by preventing derailments. But rail companies prioritize short-term profits over long-term concern for safety.
An interesting new technology available to railroads is vibration detection. Wheel bearings overheat due to excessive vibration, and now there is technology using lasers that can detect excessive vibration in bearings and axles long before they begin to overheat. (4) Actually, this technology is not brand new and has been used extensively in electric power plants to detect machinery parts that are wearing out. (5) But railroad companies, which have been reluctant to spend much money on hot box detection, won’t even consider installing vibration detection equipment on their rail cars. And the government, which is in the pockets of the companies, is far away from mandating such equipment. The rail companies and their partners in government are a long way away from providing a safe rail network.
The rail companies’ regulatory capture of government agencies is strikingly illustrated by the debate over electronically controlled pneumatic (ECP) braking systems for trains. This is the new braking system that allows trains to come to a stop somewhat faster and safer. In the East Palestine case, the train was not equipped with ECP. The NTSB does not think this would have made any difference; once the wheel bearing overheated to the point of causing an axle to break, the train was going to derail no matter how fast it braked afterwards. But in other cases, having ECP might very well help prevent an accident. Policy makers in the Dept. of Transportation have in the past tried to mandate the introduction of ECP systems throughout the rail industry. Rail companies pushed back against this, complaining that the mandate for ECP was not supported by a thorough cost-benefit analysis as required by law.
Congress has mandated that any new regulation must balance costs and benefits. The idea is that capitalist industry will not be required to adopt any new safety technology unless it can be shown that the cost of introducing it will be offset by the benefits it produces. But the idea is ridiculous, since it tries to balance monetary costs to the capitalists against benefits to the public that cannot be calculated in monetary terms – things like the benefit of being able to sleep at night without being ordered to evacuate your home due to a train wreck, or the benefit of not having your life cut short by cancer caused by a chemical spill. Certain monetary costs can be calculated, like the cost of hiring trucking firms to haul toxic chemicals out of East Palestine to be dumped in other states, but many cannot. In any case, benefits to “consumers” (that is, the public) weren’t even considered when it came to the question of ECP. Rail companies got the GAO (Government Accounting Office) to intervene, during the Trump administration, to put off the introduction of ECP. The GAO reported to Congress that a sufficient analysis of costs and benefits could not be done, because the railroad companies had not yet provided sufficient data. (See the GAO report here: (6).) That’s right; the GAO delayed the mandate to implement ECP because the rail companies had not provided sufficient data. This is like asking foxes for data on whether more secure chicken coops might reduce chicken deaths, and then delaying construction of secure coops if the foxes refuse to provide the data.
Note also that when considering benefits of ECP, the only thing GAO is interested in is, what are the benefits to the rail companies themselves? Will it help them get better gas mileage for their locomotives? Will it reduce maintenance costs for their braking systems? Will they be able to lay off more workers, to eliminate jobs? Possible benefits to the public aren’t even considered. The GAO was supposed to review “safety costs and benefits” as well as “business costs and benefits.” But they just blew off the safety benefits, not even bothering to consider that. And since the rail companies refused to provide data on possible business benefits, the GAO told Congress to forget about the mandate, and Congress dutifully delayed it. This is what constitutes a “bourgeois government”: the capitalists make the laws, then they decide how the laws will be implemented, what regulations will be written and how they will be mandated. Everything is calculated in dollars and cents, and the only dollars that count are those in the capitalist coffers. This is why ECP has been delayed and delayed again, this is why the hot box detection system has been left up to the capitalists to install at their pleasure, and this is why vibration technology has not even been considered yet. Incidentally, this is also why the mandate for new, more resilient, puncture-proof tank cars has also been delayed for years. The rail capitalists don’t consider the cost of buying new tank cars worth it, since the benefits are so minimal; after all, how many corporate CEOs live next to a railroad line?
The rail capitalists refuse to accept regulations that don’t meet their “cost-benefit analysis” criteria. Even when they do accept some regulations, they don’t hesitate to take advantage of loopholes in them. For example, present regulations allow “mixed trains” to avoid the regulations concerning trains carrying toxic or flammable materials. A train made up entirely of freight cars hauling toxic flammable materials must be marked as especially hazardous, must go at a slower rate of speed, must have only a limited number of cars, must notify local jurisdictions about their approach, and so forth. But if those same freight cars are hooked into a train with other kinds of freight – as the train in East Palestine was – then the special safety regulations do not apply. It’s no longer a “specially hazardous train”, now it’s a “mixed train”, so it’s exempt from special safety regulations. It’s not required to have ECP braking, it’s not required to travel slower, it’s not required to notify towns it’s going through, etc. The train loaded with vinyl chloride and other dangerous chemicals could sail blithely through towns with no warning about the environmental hazards onboard and be completely within regulations. This loophole inspired NTSB’s Homendy to quickly dismiss any ideas about the train violating regulations. She insisted that the train wasn’t required to have ECP braking, didn’t need to travel slow or notify anyone about being a hazardous train – it was, after all, a “mixed train”, and so was exempt from those restrictions.
The entire regulatory system needs to be overhauled. It isn’t just the rail companies that put profits ahead of safety; it’s the government regulators who kowtow to the capitalists and make excuses for them. Regulators should listen to rail workers, environmental activists and concerned citizens first, not the profit-hungry rail capitalists. Government agencies including the National Labor Relations Board must stringently enforce laws against retaliation for whistleblowing. As things stand now, rail workers are hesitant to speak out about violations of safety protocols because they’re likely to be fired. Rail workers should be trained and encouraged to supervise the enforcement of safety regulations that actually address problems, not provide loopholes to avoid them.
Politicians at the state and federal levels now propose a host of bills to address some gaps in the regulatory system. But this is mostly for show, as they don’t intend to do anything that will get them in trouble with the capitalists whose interests they represent. One example is the Railway Safety Act (RSA) of 2023 sponsored by a bipartisan group of U.S. Senators. This Act (see (7)) would mandate some reforms: it insists on hot box detectors every ten miles; it allows DOT, not the rail companies, to set the threshold temperature; it calls for research and development on new kinds of defect detectors so that faulty wheel bearings could be replaced even before they overheat; similarly, it calls for more R&D on stronger, more resilient tank cars less likely to spill hazardous chemicals. Due to present mass outrage, some version of this bill might eventually pass, though the Senate leadership has yet to comment on it. But this bill omits mention of the basic problems and leaves intact the system of regulatory capture. Safety problems were supposed to be fixed by the Railroad Safety Improvement Act of 2008, but here we are again, 15 years later, still having over 1,000 derailments per year in the U.S. The proposed Act has come under criticism from Railroad Workers United (RWU), an organization of workers and union officials from different rail unions (see (8.)). They note that the RSA omits any provision for proper training standards for rail workers; doesn’t mention adequate staffing levels; doesn’t insist on adequate time off work for employees; doesn’t mandate defined work and rest periods; doesn’t have any sick leave provisions. These are all provisions that would enhance safety, and some of these were insisted upon by workers in last year’s contract talks, but Biden and Congressional leaders refused to allow their inclusion in the contract they imposed on rail workers.
RWU further notes that even when the bill does mandate some new regulations, DOT cannot be trusted to enforce them properly because federal agencies are administered and staffed by former rail CEO’s and management, and they have “a history of subverting rail safety, issuing waivers, and all too often serve the rail industry’s agenda.” Implementing new regulations will be left up to the rail companies, and as RWU says, “Private for-profit railroads have proven themselves incapable of self-regulating.” Indeed, the pro-capitalist nature of the regulatory system is responsible for disasters. The rail workers must strive to put forward their demands and rally other workers around them as well. The public ownership of the railroads, as demanded by RWU, could be a useful step, but even then, the railroads would still be administered by a capitalist state, and the workers would still have to put pressure on the regulatory system, or else serious railroad reform won’t take place.
For this, the workers need to transform their own organizations, first of all. For example, they cannot rely on rail union leaders to fight for such change. The union leaders didn’t dream of violating Biden’s imposition of a rail contract that did not include paid sick days. And union leaders didn’t even stand up for workers assigned to clean up the East Palestine crash site, insisting they be provided PPE (see (9)). Yes, they whined about it, but still they stood by and watched as workers fell sick from toxic fumes instead of immediately pulling workers from the job.
The repeated rail disasters have caused public outrage, and they help expose the sham nature of the present regulatory system. These disasters are not isolated accidents, but the natural result of the present system in which the capitalists have free rein to do as they please with the railroads. Don’t let the politicians get away with pointing the finger at each other while the capitalists continue business as usual! It is only the growth of worker protest that can bring serious change to the regulatory system.
1) NTSB preliminary report of February 23, 2023. “Norfolk Southern Railway Train Derailment with Subsequent Hazardous Material Release and Fires”.
2) MSNBC interview of Jennifer Homendy with Symone Sanders-Townsend. “NTSB Chair discusses the board’s findings on the OH train derailment.”
3) Owen Bellwood, “U.S. railroad managers told employees to ignore wheel bearing problems”. Yahoo! News, reposted from Jalopnik, a website devoted to cars and other surface transportation, Friday, March 3, 2023.
4) Gabe Cohen, CNN. “Hot box detectors didn’t stop the East Palestine derailment. Research shows another technology might have.” Published 11:26 AM EST, Sat February 25, 2023 .
5) “Vibration monitoring solutions for the rail industry.” Corporate info-ad for Wilcoxon Sensing Technologies, July 2016.
6) “Train Braking: DOT’s Rulemaking on Electronically Controlled Pneumatic Brakes Could Benefit from Additional Data and Transparency.” GAO report # 17-122 published Oct. 12, 2016.
7) Liz Brown-Kaiser and Rose Horowitchs, “Transportation: Senators unveil rail safety bill after Ohio Train derailment.” NBC News, Wed., March 1, 2023.
8.) Press Release from Railroad Workers United. “Rail Workers Need a Comprehensive Rail Safety Bill”, Monday, March 6, 2023.
9) Lori Ann LaRocco, “Transportation: Rail unions tell Biden officials that workers have fallen ill at Norfolk Southern derailment site”. CNBC, Wed., March 1, 2023. <>
Picture: Company told workers to ignore safety problems.<>
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