Reported by Pavan Acharya for Politico
The Federal Railroad Administration will allow freight railroads to increase the use of automated track inspection technologies and reduce the number of inspections done by humans, the agency wrote in a letter dated Friday. The waiver from the FRA will allow railroads to reduce inspections done by humans from twice a week to once a week. That doesn’t go quite as far as the Association of American Railroads had asked in its letter triggering the waiver process earlier this year.
The context: Unions representing railway workers have been strongly opposed to the waiver since it was introduced, saying it would create safety concerns. Autonomous technologies, they argue, cannot identify a large number of track defects that only humans can. The Transportation Trades Department, which represents a significant number of freight rail workers, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The union over the summer said that it backs ATI technology “on top of the existing level of visual inspections, NOT as a replacement for those visual inspections.”
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