‘Substantial And Certain’ Penalties For Extra-Long Trains

By Jim Mathews / President & CEO

A long-awaited National Academies study on the problems created by extra-long freight trains this week called on regulators to impose “substantial and certain” financial penalties on freight host railroads whose unwillingness to build sidings long enough to match their ever-growing freight trains routinely delays Amtrak passengers.

The study says Congress should direct and empower the Federal Railroad Administration to enforce the preference clause with financial penalties “substantial and certain enough to deter this practice and to motivate solutions, including the rightsizing of freight trains to sidings and investments by host railroads in longer sidings.”

When it comes to the decades-long problem of extra-long, extra-slow freight trains delaying passenger trains, creating safety hazards, or even being implicated in serious rail disasters that hurt small communities where they happened, the freight host railroads have always said taking action was premature. “Wait for the data,” they said.

Well, the data are here. And they’re pretty unequivocal: when freight trains get past about a mile and a half long, derailment risks are higher, train handling is harder, braking is more challenging, infrastructure is strained, Amtrak service is degraded, and public safety is at higher risk. While stopping short of defining just how long is “too long,” the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine study released this week really would seem to be the definitive report on very long freight trains, with findings similar to – but more expansive than – those published in May in the journal Risk Analysis.

The National Academies' study zeroed in on risk-reduction strategies, blocked-crossing problems, and the effects on Amtrak trains and their fare-paying passengers.

The National Academies’ report concludes that the Federal Railroad Administration should beef up its requirements for risk-reduction programs, mandating that railroads identify, analyze, and address risks arising from all major operational changes, including issues created by running longer manifest trains.

The report also called on Congress to direct FRA to step in aggressively on blocked crossings, outlining a program to “obtain and publicly share data on blocked crossings, build a network-level understanding of the issue, and then negotiate with railroads to find solutions to the most problematic blockage sites.” This is a step your Association has pressed for many years, and this recommendation is especially welcome.

And of course in the part of the report the host railroads may find the most irritating, the National Academies confirmed that despite the nearly half-century law on the books giving Amtrak trains the right to preferential dispatch, freight railroads do, nonetheless, run trains on routes where the train’s length exceeds the length of available sidings – where trains can briefly pull aside to clear the main track – preventing passing and causing Amtrak trains to be delayed behind slower freight trains.

Ever since earlier this summer when the Justice Dept. moved to haul Norfolk Southern before a Federal district court alleging preference violations that degrade Amtrak service and hurt the fare-paying public, we’ve seen a spate of articles claiming fault on all sides. The National Academies’ report this week puts the blame squarely where it deserves to be, on host railroads running trains too long for the infrastructure they own and maintain – a business practice that has been impermissible by Federal statute for nearly half a century.

The recommendation is worth quoting in its entirety:

“Recommendation 4: Congress should direct and empower the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) to enforce the performance of host freight railroads in giving preference to Amtrak passenger trains on single-track route segments where there is a mismatch between the length of freight trains being operated and the infrastructure available on the route segment to accommodate them without delaying Amtrak trains. Under these circumstances, when an Amtrak train experiences delays because of an inability to meet or pass a freight train, the host railroad should be subject to financial penalties. The penalties should be substantial and certain enough to deter this practice and to motivate solutions, including the rightsizing of freight trains to sidings and investments by host railroads in longer sidings. This FRA function would need to be allied with the Surface Transportation Board’s jurisdiction over railroad practices and service.”

Across its 86 pages, the study identified many factors that make extra-long freight trains problematic.

The report points to significant operational risks, noting that as freight trains exceed 7,500 feet (about 1.5 miles), the risks associated with train handling, braking, and in-train forces increase. This is particularly true for manifest trains, which carry mixed cargo. These risks become more complex as train length grows, especially with diverse car types, weights, and sizes.

The Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) and the National Transportation Safety Board (TSB) also raise safety issues that come with running trains longer than 7,500 feet, pointing out that derailments, difficult in-train forces, and challenges with distributed power units are more prevalent in longer trains, making length a critical safety factor.

And then there are the infrastructure limitations. Trains longer than available sidings (designed for shorter trains) can cause significant delays to both freight and passenger trains, particularly on single-track segments. Freight trains that can’t fit into sidings block other trains, especially passenger services like Amtrak, leading to operational bottlenecks.

There are also the myriad ways in which the communities through which these trains pass suffer. The report points to the problems stemming from long trains blocking highway-rail grade crossings, leading to delays for emergency vehicles and public safety risks. As is true for the other effects, this problem, too, worsens as train lengths increase.

Apologists will point to the National Academies report’s explicit failure to define an upper limit for train length. This is true. However, the report authors spent the bulk of the report discussing the risks and complexity of operating longer trains, suggesting that today’s freight railroads spend too little time assessing the variables which drive the appropriateness of a train's length – things like the terrain, the available infrastructure, and the specific operational conditions. So even though the report did not declare that trains beyond a certain length should not be run, the data and the recommendations in the study make it clear that when train lengths exceed 7,500 feet they introduce significant challenges that need to be carefully managed in a way that they are not managed today.

That was the charge the report’s authors gave to Congress, the Federal Railroad Administration, and the host railroads. Your Association is eager to see these recommendations put into action, and will work in every available venue – Congress, FRA hearings and rulemakings, and at the Surface Transportation Board – to see them made into reality.