After a freight train carrying hazardous chemicals derailed a year ago in East Palestine, Ohio, forcing the evacuation of hundreds of residents and upending life in the town for months, the rail industry pledged to work to become safer, and members of Congress vowed to pass legislation to prevent similar disasters.
No bill was passed. And accidents went up.
Derailments rose at the top five freight railroads in 2023, according to regulatory reports for the first 10 months of the year, the most recent period for which data exists for all five companies.
And there was a steep increase in the mechanical problem — an overheated wheel bearing — that regulators think caused the derailment of the 1.75-mile-long train in East Palestine.
Norfolk Southern, the operator of the train and the owner of the track that runs through the town, was the only railroad among the five to report a decline in accidents in the period.
In response to the accident, members of Congress in March introduced a bipartisan bill aimed at making railroads safer. But crucial parts of the legislation — including a requirement that railroads use more detectors to identify overheated wheel bearings — have faced resistance from rail lobbyists, who contend that they would inhibit the ability of railroads to introduce new practices and technologies to reduce accidents. The bill has yet to be put up for a full vote in the Senate.
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The accident forced an examination of how the rail industry is regulated and its safety record.
Despite that scrutiny, the five Class 1 freight railroads operating in the United States — Union Pacific, BNSF, CSX, Norfolk Southern and Canadian National — reported 256 accidents on their main lines last year through October, an 11 percent increase over the same period in 2022, according to data compiled by the Federal Railroad Administration. The five railroads had reported an aggregate decline in accidents in 2021 and 2022.
Derailments, the most common accident, were up 13.5 percent last year, and “obstruction accidents,” a term used to describe a train striking certain objects, and the second-most-common category, rose 21 percent.
The rail administration also compiles accident causes, and this data shows that there were 17 incidents involving overheated wheel bearings in the first 10 months of last year — more than double the six recorded in the same period of 2022 and higher than any full year’s total since 2014.
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Union Pacific, the largest railroad in the United States as determined by miles of track, reported a 32 percent increase in accidents in the period. Kristen South, a company spokeswoman, said that some accidents, like those caused by objects on the track, were beyond a railroad’s control and that the focus should be on “serious” derailments, a category that she said fell 5 percent last year at Union Pacific.
BNSF, the second-largest U.S. railroad, owned by Warren E. Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, showed a 10 percent increase in accidents in the period. Kendall Kirkham Sloan, a BNSF spokeswoman, said that the company was the safest railroad in the country, based on the federal government’s measures of safety, and that accidents were being reduced by training and technology.
CSX, the third-largest railroad, reported a 31 percent increase in accidents in the 10-month period. Bryan Tucker, a spokesman, said the company’s safety performance had been “challenged” by its hiring of many new employees after the pandemic, but last year it bolstered its training, and that contributed to a steep drop in accidents in the fourth quarter. As a result, CSX on Wednesday reported an accident rate — which measures accidents as a percentage of the distances traveled by trains — that was slightly lower in 2023 than in 2022. (Its total accidents still rose.)
The five railways’ total performance last year would have been worse had it not been for significant improvement at Norfolk Southern, which reported 29 accidents in the first 10 months of 2023 on its main lines, down 37 percent from 46 in the same period of 2022.
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On its approach to East Palestine, the train that derailed did not pass an overheated-bearing detector for nearly 20 miles, suggesting that if there had been more detectors, with shorter distances between them, the problem might have been picked up earlier, perhaps averting the derailment.
Norfolk Southern added two detectors near East Palestine, resulting in an average of 11 miles between the detectors, said Connor Spielmaker, a spokesman. Across the busiest parts of its network, Norfolk Southern has added 115 detectors since March, and with more additions it expects the average distance between detectors to fall to around 11 miles from 13.9 miles by the end of this year, he said. On the approach to East Palestine, the company has put into service two of its latest digital inspection portals, which use 38 cameras to capture potential defects on trains as they pass through.
Still, Norfolk Southern had four derailments and an employee fatality last year that are being investigated by the National Transportation Safety Board. And it had five incidents involving overheated wheel bearings, the highest number in at least three decades.
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