Reported by James Baratta for American Prospect
In railroading, danger is omnipresent. Freight train crews, typically consisting of a conductor and an engineer, bear the awesome responsibility of keeping a critical piece of the supply chain moving. They regularly handle the complex decision-making required to transport goods across some of the most unforgiving regions in the U.S. Help is seldom close by, and disaster can strike at a moment’s notice. Even the slowest freight trains hauling several thousand tons of cargo can take up to a mile to stop. A mechanical failure, track obstruction, or medical emergency can quickly devolve into a broad catastrophe without swift, corrective action.
Maintenance-of-way workers who build and maintain essential rail infrastructure face similar challenges: exposure to hazardous materials, extreme weather conditions, locomotive noise on par with levels produced by aircraft during takeoff and landing, hot metal surfaces, and electrical hazards.
Rail carriers have long claimed to prioritize safety above all else, but their actions tell a different story. Inspired by Wall Street demands for cost-cutting, the widespread adoption of precision scheduled railroading, or PSR, has led North American railroads to pursue drastic workforce reductions, run longer trains with smaller crews, and inadvertently shift costs onto shippers in a bid to maximize shareholder value.
“That reduction has been extremely hard on the workers. Physically hard, mentally hard,” Tony Cardwell, president of the Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way Employes Division (BMWED), a member of the Teamsters Rail Conference, told the Prospect.
Now the railroad industry, which in recent years has spent more on stock buybacks than rail and equipment maintenance, has an even greater opportunity to implement PSR’s extreme cost-cutting measures, helped along by the Trump administration’s deregulatory agenda. Rail industry lobbyists and their allies are pushing to reduce the already threadbare crews with remotely operated or entirely autonomous trains, despite the need for split-second decisions to adapt to changing circumstances. Ultimately, the desire is to take human beings out of the process entirely and rely on ghost trains, despite the potential risks to the countryside and nearby residents.
THE SUPPOSED GOAL OF PSR is to improve efficiency by lowering operating expenses as a percentage of revenue. In practice, however, PSR has been the opposite of efficient. Rail workers of all stripes have been forced to do more with less, as many have seen their share of the workload increase by way of mandatory overtime. Furthermore, railroaders and shippers alike have laid the blame for service disruptions on tighter schedules and longer trains, both by-products of PSR.
The prospect of automation fits neatly into the PSR framework; why stop at one crew member when you can have zero? Autonomous trains took a big step forward earlier this year when the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA), the agency responsible for rail safety regulation in the U.S., granted Georgia Central Railway permission to conduct a trial run of its autonomous train pilot project with Parallel Systems. (Georgia Central workers just voted to join the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen union in advance of the project.)
It certainly will be a trial. Even if artificial intelligence can match human situational awareness in real time—a questionable assumption—ghost trains have not proven any ability to successfully traverse aging rail infrastructure. Large-scale deployment of autonomous train tech will likely need to be accompanied by substantial up-front costs and maintenance, further refining and testing for Positive Train Control (the current remote system that monitors tracks for safety), and protections against cybersecurity threats. But given that automating everything from track inspections to locomotives would significantly lower operating ratios in the long term, it should come as no surprise that business interest groups are pushing for the broader implementation of autonomous technology, even before these up-front investments are made.
Rail carriers have long claimed to prioritize safety above all else, but their actions tell a different story.
One such group, the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), a libertarian think tank, has called on the FRA to rescind a Biden-era rule requiring a second crew member on all Class I freight (which refers to railroads generating $1.05 billion or more in annual revenues) and passenger trains. The renewed opposition came after the FRA issued a request for information in early April, soliciting public comment on “existing regulations, guidance, paperwork requirements, and other regulatory obligations that can be modified or repealed” to align with the Trump administration’s deregulatory agenda.
In its comment letter, CEI dismissed the rule as a union concession crafted to “block further automation of railways” and “protect the jobs of the workers represented by the rail industry unions.”
In an interview with the Prospect, Greg Regan, president of the Transportation Trades Department, AFL-CIO (TTD), the largest transportation labor federation in the U.S., said he was not shocked by CEI’s letter: “It makes me roll my eyes.”
The position of TTD and other unions representing rail workers is simple: Automation should augment the essential work railroaders do, not replace them. CEI’s claim that there is “no practical reason why these trains could not operate with just one-person crews or be operated entirely remotely” falls flat when confronted with the grim realities of railroading today, and the importance of safeguarding the public.