http://www.ble.org/pr/news/newsflash.asp?id=4827

CLEVELAND, June 12

- The Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen and the UTU have filed a petition for an emergency order with the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) seeking to prohibit the use of one-person train crews - including conventional and remote control yard switching operations.

BLET National President Ed Rodzwicz and UTU International President Mike Futhey signed the petition for the emergency order, which was filed today.

One-person crew operations "have been nothing more than the industry's attempt to reduce operating costs to increase profits, at the expense of worker safety," says the BLET and UTU petition seeking the FRA emergency order.

"Remote control operations are a very serious hazard for a number of reasons," the petition says. "Any person having safety concerns in mind should recognize that a single-person remote control assignment should never be allowed. It puts rail workers at great risk of injury or death."

The FRA is told in the petition, "The evidence shows that no conditions exist where a lone engineer or remote control operations are safe."

The need for such an emergency order, says the BLET and the UTU, is demonstrated by a May 10 accident on CSX in Selkirk, N.Y., which killed UTU-represented conductor Jerod Boehlke, who was working alone and using a remote control device.

"The workload associated with [remote control operations], while performing other safety critical tasks, demands too much of a single individual, including loss of situational awareness," says the petition. "How many more incidents like the one at Selkirk need to occur before such
operations are prohibited?"

There are numerous incidents of accidents, injuries and fatalities where railroads utilized one-person crews, and the injuries and deaths caused by remote and single-crew operations "have continued unabated since its inception in the early 1990s," says the petition. "This has been caused in part by the inaction of the FRA to a number of petitions filed both by the BLET and the UTU for emergency orders to prevent such operations.

The petition says that while the FRA has reviewed the safety aspects of one-person crews, it "has really done nothing affirmatively to assure the safety of the employees in such operations."

The BLET and the UTU also sharply criticized FRA conclusions that the safety records of remote control and conventional operations are "basically the same."

The BLET and UTU petition says a 2006 FRA report titled "Safety of Remote Control Operations" contains major flaws. Most of FRA's erroneous figures resulted from the formulas used for calculating the statistics. For example, the accident rates calculated for each railroad failed to normalize the data to account for different crew sizes in RCL and conventional operations, even though FRA had previously stated that normalization was required in order to make an apples-to-apples comparison.

After correcting for these errors, the data actually showed that the mean RCL accident rate was nearly 3.5 times the conventional switching rate.

Similarly, correcting mean injury rates reversed the findings of the 2006 report as to which operation was safer. The data actually show a RCL injury rate almost 80 percent higher than the conventional switching injury rate, and the normalized RCL fatality rate was over 3.5 times the normalized conventional switching fatality rate.

An emergency order prohibiting the use of one-person operating crews, including remote control operations, would take effect immediately upon issuance by the FRA.

"It is time for the FRA to take a proactive safety stance, and not merely
a band-aid reactive approach to this issue," the petition concludes.

June 1, 2009 – Updated 1:23 p.m.

By Leah Nylen, CQ Staff
Two key Senate chairmen have struck a deal to include repeal of the antitrust exemption for freight railroads in a broader bill, asking Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., to scrap efforts to call up a stand-alone repeal on Tuesday.

In a letter sent to all Senate offices Monday, Herb Kohl, D-Wis., chairman of the Judiciary Antitrust Subcommittee, and John D. Rockefeller IV, D-W.Va., chairman of the Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, said they had asked Reid to drop a motion to limit debate on proceeding to the antitrust repeal (S 146) and instead would join forces to draft a more comprehensive rail policy overhaul.

The Senate had been scheduled to hold a cloture vote Tuesday morning on the motion to proceed to the antitrust repeal, which Kohl sponsored. It would require railroads to win Justice Department approval for mergers, acquisitions and collective ratemaking agreements. Under current law, freight rail is exempt from Justice Department oversight and instead must gain approval from the Surface Transportation Board (STB).
According to Senate aides, Kohl did not have the 60 votes necessary to proceed — especially after Rockefeller and Frank R. Lautenberg, D-N.J., chairman of the Commerce Surface Transportation Subcommittee, objected to moving the antitrust bill separately.
Kohl and other supporters argued that freight railroads have exploited their antitrust exemption to unfairly increase rates for areas that are served by a single railroad. Industries in these areas, known as captive shippers, say they have no choice but to pay whatever the railroad charges.

Because the legislation would amend a 1914 antitrust law, the Senate Judiciary Committee had sole jurisdiction over it. The committee approved the measure by 14-0 on March 5.

But the lack of input from the Senate Commerce Committee, which oversees railroads and rail policy, irked its senior Democrats. Lautenberg and Rockefeller have been working on a separate STB reauthorization that would seek to address the concerns.

In a “Dear Colleague” letter last week, Lautenberg and Rockefeller urged members to vote against the motion to proceed on S 146, arguing that the railroad antitrust measure could interfere with the Commerce committee’s work. Ranking Commerce Republican Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas and John Thune of South Dakota, the Surface Transportation panel’s ranking Republican, also signed the letter.

In response, Kohl’s office issued a letter maintaining that the STB reauthorization and the railroad antitrust bill were not incompatible.

“S 146 does not conflict in any way with STB rail regulation. The bill makes no changes with respect to the STB’s regulatory authority,” the rebuttal letter states. “Railroads will continue to be regulated by the STB. S 146 simply makes antitrust law fully applicable to railroads, while leaving the STB regulatory authority completely intact.”

The American Association of Railroads and other industry groups oppose the repeal measure, contending that it would hamper economic growth and create the potential for conflicts as railroads try to satisfy both the STB and the Justice Department.

In Monday’s letter announcing the withdrawal, Kohl and Rockefeller said they would press for legislation this year that would include the Commerce Committee’s provisions to overhaul the STB and repeal the antitrust exemption.