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Major freight railroads will have to maintain two-person crews on most routes under a new federal rule that was finalized Tuesday in a milestone in organized labor’s long fight to preserve the practice.
The Transportation Department’s Federal Railroad Administration released the details of the rule Tuesday morning after working on it for two years. Out of more than 13,000 comments on the rule, about 60 opposed it.
There has been intense focus on railroad safety since a fiery February 2023 derailment in Ohio, but few significant changes have been made apart from steps the railroads pledged to take themselves and the agreements they made to provide paid sick time to nearly all workers. Such changes include adding hundreds more trackside detectors and tweaking how to respond to alerts from them. A railroad safety bill proposed in response to the derailment has stalled in Congress.
Rail unions have long opposed one-person crews because of safety and job concerns. Labor agreements requiring two-person crews have been in place for roughly 30 years at major railroads, although many short-line railroads already operate with one-person crews without problems. The unions say that conductors are crucial in helping operate the train and keeping engineers alert, and that they serve as first responders.
“As trains — many carrying hazardous material — have grown longer, crews should not be getting smaller,” said Eddie Hall, the president of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen union. He praised the FRA for taking the step President Joe Biden promised. Hall said keeping two people in the cab of a locomotive is crucial now that railroads rely on longer trains that routinely stretch for miles.
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said that the U.S. shouldn’t accept the current average of nearly three derailments a day, and that regulators will keep fighting to improve that record.
“When good safety rules have been put in place over the years, especially after high-profile incidents, we see derailments come down on mainline tracks. But as attention faded on those incidents, the railroad industry lobby was consistently able to weaken or delay important safety provisions,” Buttigieg said at a news conference.
Railroads have a history of resisting new regulations as they sought the discretion to operate trains with only one person and to move conductors to ground-based jobs in places with automatic braking systems. Conductors in a truck would respond to train problems and derailments in a certain territory. It has been a key issue in contract talks for years, though the railroads abandoned the proposal just as the 2022 negotiations approached a strike.
