Of Trains and Trucks Going Catty Wampus
Land transportation in the United States is sometimes an unsafe and dangerous shitshow, and the reason is very simple.
By now you have all seen the images of toxic smoke wafting above East Palestine, Ohio, as a result of the burn off of some highly dangerous chemicals that spilled when a Norfolk Southern tanker train derailed.
And in the same week, we have seen other train derailments in Texas, South Carolina, and Connecticut.
About 1000 derailments occur every year across the United States, according to the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA). In 2022, there were 1,044 instances of trains leaving the tracks.
Some of these occur at level crossings and are not the fault of the railways, and according to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics there is a general downward trend in the number of rail accidents. That said, zero accidents, even if somewhat of an impossible concept, is a better number than any accidents; there is always room for improvement.
According to many people who work on the railroads, however, the improvements in safety seem to be taking a backseat to improvements in shareholder return.
In this piece by Vice Motherboard, workers at Norfolk Southern make a number of rather interesting observations -
After PSR’s implementation, two Norfolk Southern employees in 2021 told Motherboard they were given a safety presentation by the company that listed on-time performance, train speed, and the duration of time trains spend in the yard as more important metrics than safety. Afterwards, the shop developed a running joke that, to the workers, felt in keeping with the company’s emphasis: “Safety Fourth.” At the time Motherboard reported on this presentation, a Norfolk Southern spokesperson said the company was “firmly committed at all levels to operating safely.”
But it is not just the overall length and weight of a train that matters for safety, but the distribution of that weight. According to the train’s load profile, confirmed by two workers familiar with 32N’s load profile and reported by the cross-union worker solidarity group Railroad Workers United, 40 percent of the train’s weight was in the rear third of the train’s length, and the back half was the heavier half. This is the opposite of long standing railroad best practice, which calls for trains to be frontloaded with the heaviest cars and the lightest at the back. But rearranging train cars takes time and manpower, both of which have been cut under PSR. As Motherboard has previously reported, trains are routinely sent onto the tracks in violation of these century-old best practices in order to save time and labor costs. The longer the train, the tricker it is to control, because cars could be in different situations; for example, the front of the train could be going downhill while the back is going uphill, according to an influential white paper written by Grady Cothen, a former Federal Railroad Administration safety official on the dangers of long trains under PSR.
Emphasis mine.
We will be returning to “violation of these century-old best practices in order to save time and labor costs” very shortly.
Back in September and over at Newsweek, my Twitter pal Charles Stallworth commenting on the looming (but ultimately stymied) rail workers strike -
For starters, railroad companies have adopted something called "positive train control" or PTC for short. PTC is basically autopilot for trains. It's a great piece of technology, but since adopting it, companies have decided that the conductor role is obsolete, and you just need an engineer to take care of the train. In an effort to save money, the railroads have been pushing for a single-man crew the last few years, with the biggest freight railroads reducing staff by 29 percent.
I'm all for better technology. But it has to be safe. And there's a big problem with eliminating the role of the conductor. One of the major things the conductor does is if there is an issue with the train, some sort of defect with a railcar, say, the conductor goes out and checks what the issue is while the engineer stays in the cab to control the train.
You can see how critical it is to the safety of the workers and the train that there be two workers present for this: one taking care of the train, and one investigating the problem. The conductor also ensures that the engineer is complying with safety issues that might arise when it comes to track conditions. The engineer knows the inside of the train, but the conductor is the expert on everything else.
———
I'm often on the railroad for 13, 14 hours straight, often through the night. I'm on call 24/7, often with two hours to get to work once called. If I need a day off to go to a doctor's appointment or kid's game, I have to use PTO, but it can be denied if they really need me that day. And they have instituted a point system to discourage taking unpaid days when you run out of PTO days, which of course we all end up having to do, what with working so many hours. Too many points off and you get disciplined, and finally terminated.
What this means is that we often have to make impossible choices, between parenting our kids and hoarding those PTOs for emergencies. It all results in many problems at home and it's a huge hit to our mental health. The companies have made any kind of work/life balance impossible.
And as if hearing the fraught observations about train operations from rail workers wasn’t bad enough, here is a very detailed and alarming Twitter thread from an academic who studied derailments for her PhD dissertation. It is long, containing much to consider, and is a worthwhile read.
The title of this Substack is ‘Of Trains and Trucks Going Catty Wampus’ and now it is time to get to the trucks.
While this news cycle is currently focused on trains, and especially so given the catastrophic damage witnessed in Ohio, media focus on truck accidents is having a short reprieve; though it will no doubt return in due course.
Our friends over at LandLine Magazine published this piece last month which contains some recently compiled data on truck crashes, care of the FMCSA.
Knowing how efficiently our friends in government work, I’m assuming they are still sifting through the data for 2021 and 2022.
4444 fatal truck crashes is quite a number for one year, and vastly exceeds the number of derailments and people killed in them by orders of magnitude. Obviously, trains stay on tracks and don’t interact with cars near as often as trucks do, and the number of trucks on the road vastly exceeds the number of trains.
It should also be noted, as it is by LandLine -
And while efforts to improve highway safety often involve creating more regulations for commercial motor vehicles, it is worth noting that trucks aren’t to blame for the majority of crashes. According to 2019 statistics from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, 90.6% of truck drivers involved in fatal crashes did not receive a moving violation. Even more, 67.1% of the truck drivers in these crashes had no driver-related factors, such as speeding, fatigue, failure to yield or distracted driving. Meanwhile, only 40% of passenger vehicle drivers in these crashes had no driver-related factors cited to them.
Emphasis mine.
This is not to absolve all truck drivers of fault, and remember, these are only fatal crashes - according to the FMCSA link above, the total number of all truck crashes in 2020, fatal or not, was 415,000.
You can imagine all of the property, vehicular, and cargo damage resulting from 415,000 crashes, along with all of the costs in injury, insurance claims, and so on.
As readers of this Substack will no doubt already be aware, one of the primary causes of this unsustainable and avoidable number of incidents is driver turnover, which increases the number of low skill and low quality drivers on the road.
For more on that, check out these previous pieces from this Substack -
A study from the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute I often quote can be found here and one of the conclusions reached is summarized in this piece by Truckinginfo.com -
When combining all crash types, drivers with less than a year of CMV experience had “higher proportions of crash involvement” than drivers with more experience, regardless of age. Preventable crashes showed similar results, “with less-experienced CMV drivers having higher proportions of crash involvement across the majority of age groups.”
In other words, experience matters.
“violation of these century-old best practices in order to save time and labor costs”
Where the trucking and rail industries happen to be colliding (pun intended) is in their seemingly boundless desire to sacrifice just about everyone on the altar of the next quarters earnings report; the shareholder always given preference over the drinking water and lives of the residents of East Palestine, and the livelihoods of America’s millions of truckers.
While there are some drivers who do make a decent living out there, recent statistics indicate that the average salary is 48k/year for a job that requires most drivers put in 60 hours or more a week, while often spending weeks at a time away from home. For a job that the motoring public demands be as safe as possible, you would think it would pay more than what is effectively minimum wage.
You can see how this leads to 92% annual turnover rates for many large trucking companies, which implies that these companies have to put a lot of new bums in seats in order to keep moving freight.
According to The White House(!) over 50,000 CDLs and Learners Permits were issued, on average, each and every month in 2021, which is another way of saying nearly 600,000 people, at very least, attempted to get into trucking over that year, or take on some other job which required a CDL. And this is not even considering that the graduates of nearly every CDL School in America are qualified to only pass a test, and by any rational measure, do not yet count as ‘truckers’.
This again implies that, setting aside any growth driven demand in the business, a shit ton of people quit trucking altogether if this many new people sought to become replacements. And with new ‘drivers’ come more accidents.
As long as the trucking industry, much like its competitors over on the railroads, continue to view the idea of a happy, safe, well rested, and well compensated Professional Workforce as a bygone piece of history with no place in our modern economy, they will both continue to externalize the costs of not having a happy, safe, well rested, and well compensated Professional Workforce on to everyone else - in the form of environmental catastrophe, lives lost, and the endless corporate welfarism of the taxpayer having to pick up the tab for it all.
Thanks for that link to Anne Junod, whom I'd been unaware of. Regarding the E. Palestine disaster, it seems that the train had a two-person crew, so that didn't prevent it. Also of note, the Lac Megantic crash involved a small railroad which was bankrupted, but Norfolk Southern has net assets valued, if my quick read is correct, at over $10 billion. Bankrupting them might not fully compensate the victims, but would certainly be helpful. And provide some proper incentive to other companies.
This is a real eye-opener. I knew very little of commercial transport before diving into your substack (found through Malcom Kyeyune). Thanks!