News Archive
BNSF crew proposal was defeated by 5-1 margin
Of 3,679 ballots returned, 3,056 were in opposition to the crew consist agreement. Nearly the same number of ballots cast were in opposition to a wage and rule settlement offered by the carrier. Under the proposal, engineers would have received a pay boost, and conductors wou [...]Search is on for rail congestion cure
A soybean farmer from southwestern Minnesota and an official of a taconite mine in the northeast, and more than a dozen others, came to the same conclusion: Significant railroad delays throughout the Upper Midwest are hurting nearly everyone in business. Bill Gordon, who farm [...]Public transportation trips rise in second quarter
More than 2.7 billion trips were taken on U.S. public transportation in the second quarter of 2014, according to a report released Sept. 29 by the American Public Transportation Association (APTA). This is a 1.1 percent increase over the same quarter last year, representing a [...]Oil, rail industries want seven years to fix tank cars
The oil and railroad industries are urging federal regulators to allow them as long as seven years to retrofit existing tank cars that transport highly volatile crude oil, a top oil industry official said Tuesday (Sept. 30). The cars have ruptured and spilled oil during colli [...]End of line for railroad conductors? Not so fast
WASHINGTON — How many people does it take to safely operate a freight train? Two, say railroad labor unions, the Federal Railroad Administration and some members of Congress, arguing that having just one person in the cab of a locomotive was unsafe. They cite a series of dead [...]Inspectors find scores of defects on CSX rails in Va.
In the days after a train carrying highly flammable oil to Yorktown plunged off its tracks in downtown Lynchburg, dumping 15 cars into the James River and sparking a fire so intense that emergency crews had to simply let it burn itself out, federal track inspectors found more [...]