FRA: 20 employee fatalities in 2010

WASHINGTON — Figures released by the Federal Railroad Administration for 2010 show that 20 rail employees — eight of them UTU members — died in on-duty accidents in 2010. There were 16 on-duty employee deaths in 2009 — eight being UTU members. Highway- [...]

Signalmen official nominated for RRB seat

Walt Barrows, secretary-treasurer of the Brotherhood of Railroad Signalmen since 1999, has been nominated by President Obama to fill the labor chair on the three-member Railroad Retirement Board, succeeding Butch Speakman, who is retiring. The nomination requires Senate confi [...]

New NS board member has familiar name

Former Clinton White House Chief of Staff Erskine Bowles has been elected a member of Norfolk Southern’s board of directors. His name is most associated with President Obama’s National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility, on which he served as co-chair with former [...]

Rail intermodal eyeing record territory

Railroad intermodal (the movement of trailers and containers aboard flatcars) is poised to enter a “golden age,” reports the Journal of Commerce. The magazine estimates that 2011 could set an intermodal shipment record, eclipsing the record 14.2 million trailers a [...]

N.J. UTU SLD’s father dies

The father of UTU State Legislative Director Dan O’Connell died Feb. 25 in Mt. Laurel, N.J., at age 89. Michael L. “Mickey” O’Connell Jr. was a decorated World War II Navy veteran and a brakeman and conductor with Conrail and two of its predecessors — Pennsy [...]