Report: Despite promises, railroads don’t join voluntary safety program

According to a new report, despite promises to join a voluntary safety program, none of the country’s largest freight railroads have done so.

The Howard Center for Investigative Journalism reported that only two railroads, BNSF and Norfolk Southern, have launched partial trials of the Confidential Close Call Reporting System.

Additionally, according to the report, which the Associated Press republished, a federal working group established to address railroad participation in the program, commonly referred to as the C³RS, has recently dissolved.

“We had an opportunity as a group to make things better and make things safer, and we didn’t do it,” Jim Mathews, president and CEO of the Rail Passengers Association advocacy organization, told the Howard Center. “Think about how much better and how much safer it could be if we could add all of those 120,000 employees into the mix and all of those operations of hundreds and hundreds of trains a day all across the country.”

Mathews served on the now-disbanded working group.

The Federal Railroad Administration supports a voluntary, confidential program that allows railroads and their employees to report close calls. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration maintains its data as an independent third-party organization.

The program, inspired by a similar one initiated in 1976 for the aviation industry, aims to enable employees to report unsafe events and conditions and protect them from discipline and FRA enforcement. Railroads also “receive protection from FRA enforcement for events reported within C3RS,” according to the agency.

According to the FRA, all Class I freight railroads agreed to participate in C3RS in March 2023 following the East Palestine derailment.

Atlanta-based Norfolk Southern Corp. initially said it would join the program in March 2023. In January 2024, the freight railroad and two unions announced they would partner with the FRA on a one-year pilot of the Confidential Close Call Reporting System with the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen and the International Association of Sheet Metal, Air, Rail and Transportation Workers – Transportation Division.

“If we could get all the (workers) involved in it, maybe we could avoid an East Palestine in the future,” Scott Bunten, a Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen general chairman, told the Howard Center. “We go through a lot of people’s backyards on the railroad. I think the general public doesn’t know it, but they have a huge stake in C³RS as well.”

Bunten helps coordinate a trial program with Norfolk Southern.

Following the East Palestine derailment, federal lawmakers also bandied about legislation that they said would have improved railroad safety. Despite numerous headlines and backing from prominent lawmakers, lawmakers did not pass the Railway Safety Act.

Among its provisions, the legislation increases the frequency of “defect detection” technology, which lawmakers said could have prevented the Ohio derailment and mandates two-person train crews for railroads. It would also require railroads to inform state officials about hazardous materials traveling through local jurisdictions and increase civil penalties for violations.

Class I railroads declined the Howard Center’s requests for interviews.

An analysis the FRA published last year revealed that railroads that participated in the close call program experienced a roughly 20% decrease in the number of total train accidents or incidents per million train miles.

“C3 RS is a system for learning from mistakes,” the FRA said in a December 2024 report. All participating railroads could benefit from experimenting in small ways to improve upon their current use of C3 RS.”