FRA wants railroads to bolster winter operation procedures

U.S. railroads should beef up the procedures they use for responding to adverse weather conditions, including seeing how weather-related technologies can be integrated into positive train control and whether the railroads can collaborate on developing best practices, according to a safety advisory from the Federal Railroad Administration.

The agency hopes that by issuing the safety advisory, railroads can reduce the incident level of weather-related accidents. In this latest advisory, FRA pointed out that since the start of 2021, there have been 123 rail incidents in which severe weather conditions or weather-related events may have contributed in part or in whole to those accidents. Of these incidents, more than half of them were main-track derailments, but the advisory doesn’t detail the severity level of the various incidents.

FRA gave six recommendations for the railroads to consider:

Evaluate existing communication and training programs, rules, policies and procedures to make sure that railroads can adequately respond to weather-related incidents and that the information is up to date.
Determine whether weather forecasting policies and procedures can be integrated with dispatching operations and even incorporated with positive train control systems.
Evaluate areas where railroads’ operating infrastructure is susceptible to severe weather events. Railroads can also use technology to monitor critical infrastructure in real time, and the industry and federal, state and local agencies can establish standardized interfaces for weather-related action plans.
Look at whether existing weather-related action plans adequately address risks and whether railroads should develop an auditing program to ensure weather alert systems are working.
Establish standard operating thresholds that can help railroads operate through severe weather events.
Work with other railroads to develop best practices for utilizing weather forecasting technologies, predictive weather models and weather-related action plans. This could include determining how much deviation exists between railroads’ operating procedures during severe weather events.

FRA’s John Karl Alexy, associate administrator for railroad safety and chief safety officer, signed the safety advisory.

This most recent advisory is the sixth one that FRA has issued in 2023. FRA released four other safety advisories following the Feb. 3 derailment of a Norfolk Southern train in East Palestine, Ohio. While the incident resulted in no injuries, the planned release of vinyl chloride days after the derailment rattled the local community.

The last time FRA issued six safety advisories in a calendar year was 2013. In 2016, the agency issued four advisories, and in 2015 issued three. FRA issued two safety advisories in 2014 and 2020, and in the years 2018, 2021 and 2022, just one safety advisory was issued. In 2017 and 2019, no safety advisories were issued.

Transport Canada has been requiring Canadian Pacific Kansas City and CN since 2022 to submit plans about how they expect to conduct rail operations in winter. That mandate aligned with a recommendation from the Transportation Safety Board of Canada to compel the railways to submit such winter plans following a February 2019 derailment in Field, British Columbia, in which a Canadian Pacific grain unit train derailed, killing three employees.

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