(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . What happened in Ohio - a summary of the rail disaster. Time to start talking about Open Access? [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.', 'Backgroundurl Avatar_Large', 'Nickname', 'Joined', 'Created_At', 'Story Count', 'N_Stories', 'Comment Count', 'N_Comments', 'Popular Tags'] Date: 2023-02-17 DOT MAP SHOWING DERAILMENTS IN THE UNITED STATES BY COUNTY, 1975-2022. THE CIRCLES TO THE RIGHT OF THE MAP SHOW THE NUMBER OF DERAILED CARS; SMALL DOT IS 1K, LARGER DOT IS 10K. That’s the headline on an opinion piece in the New York Times (the link in the headline should allow full access) by David Sirota, Rebecca Burns, Julia Rock and Matthew Cunningham-Cook, all journalists at The Lever which has been doing yeoman work on the story. The commentary provides chapter and verse on all of the things that have come together to create the disaster in East Palestine, Ohio. Safety measures fought by the railroads, workers stressed to the breaking point, communities put at risk — and record profits to keep Wall Street happy. The recent freight train derailment and chemical fire in eastern Ohio that left thousands of nearby residents fearing for their health was not a one-off tragedy or a random life-imitating-art manifestation of Don DeLillo’s classic novel “White Noise.” Instead, it was proof of just how dangerous America’s rail industry has become. The number of derailments has declined since the 1970s, but the United States still has over 1,000 derailments every year. And over the last seven years, the costs from derailments of trains carrying hazardous materials increased. The precise cause of the Norfolk Southern derailment in East Palestine is still under investigation. But we know it occurred in an industry that tolerates too many preventable derailments and fights too many safety regulations. During the Obama and Trump administrations, the rail industry successfully lobbied against stricter rules for trains carrying flammable chemicals, and against more advanced brakes that experts and the rail industry itself have said could lessen the severity of derailments. How do they do this? It’s basic balance-sheet economics thanks to Citizens United. A few millions spent in lobbying can can yield billions in profits — especially given the management strategy of Precision Scheduled Railroading which is all about maximizing profits at the expense of everything else. After a 2016 campaign in which rail industry donors poured more than $6 million into G.O.P. campaign coffers, President Donald Trump repealed the brake rule, and the Biden administration has failed to restore it. All of this happened as rail company owners took home nearly $200 billion in stock buybacks and dividends and reduced their work force by nearly 30 percent as part of a so-called “precision scheduled railroading” strategy, despite workers’ warning that understaffing has made it more difficult to maintain safety and maintenance standards. Read The Whole Thing. Among other things it includes a graphic showing the cars in the 1.7 mile long train, what they were carrying, and what happened to them. The train was crewed by two people plus a trainee — which is two more than railroads want. (The CNN article at the link has railroads arguing they will lose business to trucks — totally bullshit because railroads are already driving their customers to trucks with terrible service, and because they won’t spend the money they need to to actually compete.) If you haven’t seen it yet, this photo shows just how big the cloud was from the explosion to burn off the chemicals. Robert Reich weighs in here: The Biden Administration is seriously Off Track The rail industry is in need of serious regulatory attention — and so are the regulators who are supposedly protecting public safety. The Biden administration is not looking very good on this. They did not pursue restoring safety measures Trump killed, and The Lever reports the DOJ appears to be siding with Norfolk Southern on protection from lawsuits while Pete Buttigieg at Transportation is claiming it’s up to Congress to act. As it happens, six environmental groups are threatening legal action if Buttigieg does not act. Rail workers are angry that the Biden administration late last year forced them to accept a contract they had voted down, a contract that ignored, among other things, the safety issues workers have been warning about. The issues I was writing about in September 2022 haven’t gone away (here and here) and I can tell you people working for the railroads are not happy campers to put it mildly. Rail is too important to trust to the railroads and Wall Street. This Fact Check from USA TODAY about all of the questions surrounding the wreck (derailment is such an innocuous word) is a must-read, loaded with links to more reports on it. Although the media’s attention was monopolized to some extent by more serious matters, like the Super Bowl, the Grammies, and Chinese Spy Balloons, what happened in East Palestine, OH is a story with legs. The more that comes out, the worse it looks. This story from England is painful by contrast. It seems hard to credit a rail line in America seeming so benign. I live around the corner from one of the larger rail yards in the northeast — and a plastics plant is built right next to it. Between what they ship in and out and all the other stuff moving through the rail yard, it’s enough to make it hard to sleep at night. What Can Be Done Going Forward? Between the way Hedge Funds are ‘extracting value’ from the rail industry and the concerns its operations are raising with the public, the rail industry is in danger of becoming unsustainable as a business and as a transportation mode. That’s something that cannot be permitted. Something you will not likely hear about in most of the press coverage of what happened in Ohio is a call to adopt an Open Access model for the rail industry. This article in Freight Waves has an interview with Paul Lindsey, a locomotive engineer and a member of Railroad Workers United’s steering committee. LINDSEY: “You have to really be careful with how you explain it because people’s eyes will gloss over because they have assumptions. What we are not advocating is the government running all the trains, coming in and saying they want all the freight trains to run like Amtrak. … “What we’re advocating is putting the railroad infrastructure — the physical plant, the tracks — into the same type of situation that our national highways and our waterways and airports, to a large extent, are placed in: They are managed, dispatched, controlled, maintained publicly. … “We advocate because there needs to be reciprocal switching. There needs to be open access. If you want to come in there and start a railroad and run on these publicly owned tracks to provide more competition just like trucking companies do, you should be able to. As it sits now, there’s no ability to do that. You have monopolies that own the track and control the investment in infrastructure when we should be electrifying, [when] we should be making our infrastructure better for the future. … Even if a railroad wanted to come in and serve customers the railroads don’t want to serve, they can’t because it’s considered private property whereas the interstate highways are not considered private property. Any truck, anyone can get a motor carrier number and a DOT number and go out there and haul freight on our nation’s highways.” emphasis added Open Access is not a new concept. It’s something the European Union has been advancing, and it’s a model that can be applied elsewhere to address better freight and conventional passenger rail, not just High Speed Rail. It’s not just about safety — railroads could be a key player in decarbonizing the economy. Solutionary Rail has a detailed blueprint on how we could get carbon out of transportation AND make clean power available across the country, along with revitalizing trackside communities with better passenger and freight service. (Check out Climate Rail Alliance while you’re at it. Also, the Rail Passengers Association.) The current rail industry model serves no one well except Wall Street. It’s time to bring Main Street back in the picture. If nothing else, there’s a lot of low hanging-fruit here to make rail in America what it could and should be. We cannot trust the industry to do the right thing, as what we’ve seen in Ohio and elsewhere demonstrates. UPDATE: This NPR story explains how Precision Scheduled Railroading is causing safety issues — and a lot of other problems. 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