EAST PALESTINE, Ohio — It was a day like any other for Norfolk Southern employees on Feb. 3, 2023. A train carrying 150 cars left the yard in Madison, Illinois, bound for the Conway Yard in Beaver County, Pennsylvania, one of the largest railyards in the U.S.
The train was carrying a variety of goods, including wheat, plastic pellets, malt liquor and lube oil, as well as hazardous and combustible materials like vinyl chloride and butyl acrylate.
As the train made its way through eastern Ohio, things began to go awry. A hot box sensor 30 miles outside of East Palestine, Ohio, detected that a wheel bearing was 38 degrees above ambient temperature, according to a preliminary report produced by the National Transportation Safety Board.
Hotbox sensors are set up every 20 miles on the railroad tracks. No alert goes out to the crews on board as the wheel bearing remains under the required stop temperature of 170 degrees above ambient, according to Norfolk Southern guidelines.
Trouble sets in as the train passes by Salem, Ohio, about 20 miles away from East Palestine. Surveillance footage from a local residence shows sparks shooting out of one of the wheels. The hot box detects 103 degrees above ambient. Still, the crew receives no alerts.
It isn’t until the train reaches East Palestine that a hot box records the wheel at 253 degrees above ambient temperature, and the crew is finally alerted. The crew is instructed to slow down and stop the train to inspect a hot axle. But it is too late.
At approximately 8:55 p.m., several cars derailed, including some containing hazardous chemicals that ignited a fire right behind Leake Oil gas station on Taggart Road.
Local fire departments quickly responded to the scene without knowing what dangerous cargo the train was carrying. Nearly 70 fire departments and emergency responders from three states responded to the derailment throughout the night.
It took emergency responders 45 minutes before they figured out what they were fighting. The train crew who had access to this information was a mile away from the site, after detaching the engine to move additional cars.
Less than 100 yards away, patrons of the State Line Tavern were standing in the parking lot of the bar. Other locals gathered to gawk at the chaotic scene, the likes of which no one had ever seen.
Initially, all residents within a mile of the derailment site were ordered to evacuate. Three days later, the evacuation would be expanded as a controlled release and burn of vinyl chloride was ordered to avoid a catastrophic explosion.
“Derailments happen every day,” said Dennis Sabina, president of the Transportation Workers Union Local 2035 and retired Norfolk Southern carman. “It just depends to what extent.”
“Just like if you had a train set when you were a kid, it comes off the track. That’s all, then you put it back on,” said Sabina. “Fortunately, we don’t have the same catastrophic results that we had in East Palestine. Thank god we don’t.”
Nearly 140,000 miles of rail run through the U.S., much of it east of the Mississippi. Ohio and Pennsylvania rank in the top four for miles of rail line, with each state having just over 5,000 miles of rail.
In the U.S., about a third of freight is moved by rail, which can include anything from TVs to medicine to chemicals like vinyl chloride. Trains transport hazardous chemicals through small communities all the time, usually without incident, Sabina said.
While the train derailment in East Palestine was caused by an overheated wheel bearing, Sabina and other railroad unions warn the issues at play within the railroad industry are much bigger than a bad part. Without significant changes to regulations and workplace culture, what happened in East Palestine could happen somewhere else.
Incidents Common
Throughout the industry, derailments and other incidents are shockingly common. In 2017, Norfolk Southern had 1,129 accidents occur on its railroads, according to data from the U.S. Department of Transportation Federal Railroad Administration. Accidents include collisions, derailments, highway-rail crossings and obstruction.
In 2023, Norfolk Southern saw a decline in incidents with a total of 798. Between these years, the industry as a whole also saw a significant decrease in derailments.
Yet since the East Palestine derailment, several trains across the country have derailed — some of which leaked contaminants.
About a month after the East Palestine derailment, a BNSF Railway train carrying hazardous materials and ethanol derailed in Minnesota. Four of the cars caught fire. Residents living in a half-mile radius had to evacuate.
Around the same time, a train derailed in Springfield, Ohio. Among the derailed cars were four carrying diesel exhaust fluid and a polyacrylamide water solution and one containing non-toxic PVC pellets. The car carrying the PVC pellets was the only one to spill and, according to U.S. EPA officials, it posed no health risk.
On Thanksgiving eve, a CSX train derailed in Livingston, Kentucky. Two of the 16 cars carried molten sulfur that ignited a fire. The 200 residents in Livingston were evacuated. After the fire was put out, state officials monitored for the release of sulfur dioxide and nothing was found.
Within the course of cleaning up the derailment site in East Palestine, on two occasions trucks spilled hazardous waste in Ohio. In April, 20,000 pounds of contaminated soil from the derailment site was spilled onto State Route 165 North and, on Jan. 2, another truck leaked four gallons of wastewater and 200 gallons of diesel fuel in Geauga County.
Most recently, on Jan. 23, a train carrying ethanol derailed in Greenville, Ohio.
The cause
In 1998, railroads across the country began looking for ways to make the transportation of goods more efficient and cost-effective. To do this, railroad companies adopted a practice called Precision Scheduled Railroading, PSR.
The strategy was used by railroads to ensure trains were constantly on the move via a set train schedule. The three key components of PSR are to minimize train downtime, run longer trains at higher speeds and reduce power requirements.
Before the derailment, railroad unions warned companies about the dangers associated with PSR. Now, they say PSR is the “primary culprit” of the derailment.
While it sounds good on paper, Sabina said, the practice has led to severe job cuts in the railroad industry over the years and less time for workers to conduct safety inspections.
“It was a move to make money for the investors and to cut into the labor force from all the departments,” Sabina said. “It shorted us on safety and manpower, so it had an effect. And now they’re trying to recover from that.”
Norfolk Southern Chief Executive Officer Alan Shaw has defended the use of PSR.
“Precision Scheduled Railroading has a lot of principles that would make sense in any manufacturing environment,” Shaw said, at a recent media roundtable in East Palestine. “It’s work safety, develop your people, serve your customers, control costs and manage your assets.”
In response to the derailment, Norfolk Southern implemented the Six-Point Safety Plan to emphasize safety.
According to their website, the plan includes improving its hot bearing detectors and hot bearing standards, investing in the AI Digital Train Inspection program and supporting a strong safety culture for all railroads.
Shaw mentioned the company partnered with Georgia Tech Research Institution on the AI Digital Train Inspection program. The program will build tunnels over railroad tracks that contain 38 cameras used to snap pictures; AI will then look for potential safety defects. The program is a multi-year project and has no finish date as of yet.
Sabina, who retired from the company as a carman in November 2023, has seen the company put an extra emphasis on safety over the past year. However, he’s not sure if it’s being practiced.
Norfolk Southern has been hiring and training a wealth of new employees since the derailment, but he contends everything is still rushed. Particularly, workers conducting quality inspections have felt increased pressure to identify cars in disrepair but fix them quickly.
Now, the shops are backed up with cars needing repairs and the company is unhappy. The workers taking the time to do inspections the right way feel like they have targets on their backs, Sabina said.
“They’re damned if they do and damned if they don’t,” Sabina said. “The guys that aren’t doing it the right way get in trouble, the guys that are doing them the right way could get in trouble for doing that.”
According to the National Transportation Safety Board’s ongoing preliminary report on the cause of the East Palestine derailment, future investigations will focus on the wheelset and bearing, tank car design and derailment damage, railcar design and maintenance procedures/practices and Norfolk Southern’s use of wayside defect detectors and railcar inspection practices.
Railroad regulation
A month after the derailment, Ohio and Pennsylvania’s U.S. Senators, Democrat Sherrod Brown, Republican J.D. Vance and Democrats Bob Casey and John Fetterman introduced the bipartisan Railway Safety Act of 2023 to strengthen railway safety, “so no community has to suffer like East Palestine again,” according to Brown.
The legislation seeks to change safety requirements for trains carrying hazardous materials, make new requirements for wayside defect detectors, mandate a two-person crew and increase fines for railroads who break the rules, among other things.
Democratic Congressman Chris Deluzio, who represents Pennsylvania’s 17th Congressional District which covers Beaver County, has been an avid supporter of the legislation and introduced a bipartisan companion bill in the House.
“We can’t have these big powerful railroads view people like us who live near the tracks as collateral damage in the way of their profit,” Deluzio said, in an interview with Farm and Dairy.
Yet, a year after the derailment, the legislation is still stalled in the Senate. Majority Leader Chuck Schumer promised to schedule a vote on the long-delayed bill soon despite being opposed by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.
The Association of American Railroads, a trade group representing the freight car industry, and Norfolk Southern’s Shaw also oppose parts of the bill.
Particularly, they disagreed on mandating two-person crews. Shaw cited no link between safety and crew size and noted a three-person crew was on board the train that derailed in East Palestine. Despite that, Shaw said he supports many of the aspects of the bill.
“We need an industry-wide solution and so that’s why I’m advocating for many of the principles in those bills,” Shaw said, during the recent media roundtable.
AAR said it has never been opposed to the Railway Safety Act, but that the bill poses challenges and instead should be focused on “solution-driven policies.” Provisions that pose challenges according to AAR include micromanaging detector networks, expanding hazmat transportation operating requirements, unnecessarily broadening manual inspections and mandating crew staffing.
Sabina said two-person crews are essential when it comes to safety on railroads. On average, trains carry up to 75 to 130 cars which could be miles in length. A one-person crew consists of an engineer and a conductor. If only a one-person crew is on board and the train is stopped too long, it could pose a safety hazard.
“Imagine if there’s an incident where this train can’t move and you have only one person on there and the guy has to walk back three-quarters of a mile, fix what’s wrong and then walk back (to) move the train,” Sabina said. “That could take two hours. So what happens if there’s an ambulance or emergency personnel that needs to get through? What do they do?”
(Editor’s note: The AAR did not respond to a request for comment before Farm and Dairy’s print deadline, Jan. 29. The story was updated online on Feb. 1 to reflect a statement sent by AAR to Farm and Dairy after deadline.)
(Reporter Liz Partsch can be reached at epartsch@farmanddairy.com or 800-837-3419.)
