Norfolk Southern rule that railcars be inspected in less than a minute sparks safety concerns

Norfolk Southern sparked renewed concerns about flaws being missed during railcar inspections when it told employees this week they should spend no more than a minute looking at each car. But the railroad said the rule simply reflects the current industry standard, and there are no plans for disciplining employees for missing that one-minute target.

Rail unions have been raising the alarm for several years now about inspections being rushed across the industry in the wake of the railroads eliminating one-third of all the jobs as they adopted the current lean operating model that has become the standard.

The Federal Railroad Administration's Chief Safety Officer Karl Alexy said the agency was already tracking inspection times closely across the industry before the new announcement from Norfolk Southern, and the agency will be watching how the railroad implements it.

“If they really are going to be held to that, I'm very concerned about defects not being found, I think that is pretty quick,” Alexy said.

Railroad safety concerns became widespread last year after a Norfolk Southern train derailed, spilled hazardous chemicals and caught fire in East Palestine, Ohio, in February.

The railroad — and the entire industry — promised reforms after that disastrous wreck. But Alexy said there hasn't been much significant improvement in railroads' overall safety record in recent years.

The concerns about rushed railcar inspections are part of rail labor’s broader concerns about whether the lean Precision Scheduled Railroading (PSR) model railroads are using is more dangerous.

Alexy said that one of the key challenges for the industry right now is that so many experienced workers were lost because of all the job cuts in recent years — both because of the new operating model and the sharp downturn in business during the pandemic — that the railroads are relying on a large number of newer employees who are still learning all the risks of the job.

“There are implications from PSR where they they cut too deep their personnel. And Covid happened and they lost more people, and then they had a hard time bringing them back,” Alexy said. “So I think that there have been some long-term negative impacts of PSR and of course Covid as well.”

Norfolk Southern executives said last year that the railroad would back away from rushing inspections because of safety concerns. But the new directive about minute-long inspections issued not long after Mark George was promoted to be the railroad's new CEO this fall appears to reverse that stance.

Norfolk Southern is not alone in pushing for inspections to be done quickly to keep trains moving.

The Federal Railroad Administration found earlier this year that at all the major freight railroads, carmen spent an average of 1 minute and 38 seconds looking over each car while a federal inspector was watching. But documents showed that when an inspector isn’t there, inspections were being done in about 44 seconds per car.

The Transportation Communications Union that represents the carmen tasked with inspecting railcars maintains it simply isn't possible to check the more than 90 points per side they are supposed to check on each railcar within such a short period of time, so clearly things are being missed.

The union's National Legislative Director David Arouca said carmen on Norfolk Southern went “absolutely ballistic” when they saw the new one-minute rule after they have been raising concerns about the perils of rushed inspections for years.

“You can’t place your eyeballs on 90 points of inspection in 30 seconds (per side) and do that repeatedly for 50-100 cars in a row and not miss things,” Arouca said.

That is especially true when carmen are inspecting cars that might have been in use for decades while rolling past them on an ATV, which is common. "The idea that this is a comprehensive inspection according to the federal regulations is a joke," he said.

The Federal Railroad Administration found during its checks that between 13% and 15% of all the cars still had defects after they were inspected by the railroads. But most of the problems federal inspectors found then weren't the kind of thing that would cause a derailment. The most common issues the railroads missed were things like bent hand rails workers use when climbing on cars.

Alexy said it seems like “whatever is missed is not resulting in a huge impact to safety across the country.”

And Alexy said even if carmen had significantly more time to inspect cars, it is difficult to find the kind of flaws that cause derailments like failing bearings sealed inside an axle or cracked wheels. The East Palestine derailment was caused by a bad bearing that overheated but wasn't caught in time by trackside detectors that are designed to spot temperature increases like that.

Norfolk Southern said this new standard will help them gauge whether they have enough carmen in every location to handle the required inspections because if it is taking longer than one minute they might need more people or the railroad may need to follow up with the shipper that owns the railcar to ensure needed maintenance is being done.

“By no means are employees expected to ignore or disregard safety issues. If a problem is spotted, employees are required to address it, either by correcting the issue on site or by pulling the car for further maintenance,” Norfolk Southern spokeswoman Heather Garcia said.

Alexy said if that is truly how this rule is used, it might not be a problem. But he said that if the new one-minute standard is “taken to an extreme, it could be” a step backwards in safety at Norfolk Southern, which has been stressing safety ever since the East Palestine derailment.

The test will be how the rule is implemented by railroad managers in the field across the eastern United States where Norfolk Southern's trains operate.