“Specifically, regulators killed provisions requiring rail cars carrying hazardous flammable materials to be equipped with electronic braking systems to stop trains more quickly than conventional air brakes. Norfolk Southern had previously touted the new technology — known as electronically controlled pneumatic ECP brakes — for its “potential to reduce train stopping distances by as much as 60 percent over conventional air brake systems.” > > But the company’s lobby group nonetheless pressed for the rule’s repeal, telling regulators that it would “impose tremendous costs without providing offsetting safety benefits.”
“Would ECP brakes have reduced the severity of this accident? Yes,” Steven Ditmeyer, a former senior official at the Federal Railroad Administration FRA, told the Lever. “The railroads will test new features. But once they are told they have to do it . . . they don’t want to spend the money.”
“Prior to the stock buyback era, railroads agreed that ECP brakes were a good thing,” said Ron Kaminkow, a longtime railroad worker and organizer with Railroad Workers United. “The railroads hadn’t yet come to the realization that they could do whatever they wanted. ECP brakes were on the drawing board, then off.”
Norfolk Southern also reported lobbying against “requiring ECP brakes” during the rule-making process. In a 2015 legislative testimony, Norfolk Southern’s vice president Rudy Husband told Pennsylvania lawmakers that while the company planned to comply with the new rule, the “rail industry has serious concerns about the ECP brake requirements and the potential adverse impacts on the fluidity of the national freight rail network.”
“If the axle breaks, it’s almost certain that the train is going to derail,” said John Risch, a former BNSF engineer and national legislative director for the Sheet Metal, Air, Rail, and Transportation Workers. “ECP brakes would help to bring the train to a stop. What they do is activate the brakes on each car at the same time immediately. That’s significant: When you apply the brakes on a conventional train, they brake from the front to the rear. The cars bunch up.”
Risch said that ECP brakes are the “most remarkable advancement” he ever encountered in his thirty-one-year career as a railroad worker, adding: “It needs to be implemented.”
But instead of investing in the safety feature, the seven largest freight railroad companies in the United States, including Norfolk Southern, spent $191 billion on stock buybacks and shareholder dividends between 2011 and 2021, far more than the $138 billion those firms spent on capital investments in the same time period.
https://jacobin.com/2023/02/rail-companies-safety-rules-ohio-derailment-brake-sytems-regulations
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