Safety Starts With Us

New Crew Room and Breakroom Safety Posters Now Available to All Locals Across Rail and Bus Departments

For more than a century, railroaders and transit workers have survived by doing what the carriers and agencies refuse to do: look out for each other. Today, SMART-TD is putting that tradition into print, literally.

Railroads Are Hiding Safety. We’re Bringing It Back Into the Light.

Across the industry, Class I carriers and short lines alike have begun quietly shifting their federally required workplace-injury postings off the crew-room walls and into computer systems most crews barely have time to access, let alone study. CSX led the charge in 2020 when it requested permission to stop posting injuries and illnesses where crews could see them. They wanted them hidden in a digital maze instead of stapled to a bulletin board where rail workers talk, learn, and prepare to work safely.

That move was approved despite objections from labor. But it means what used to be a conversation starter in every on-duty point has become an afterthought buried behind mandatory checkboxes. The result? Thirty days can pass before anyone even learns someone was hurt. That’s thirty days of walking the same bad footing, using the same bad equipment, and encountering the same conditions that caused the injury.

And CSX isn’t alone. Other carriers are following the same pattern: injuries are up, fatalities continue, and transparency is down. Instead of engaging crews, the railroads are compromising safety.

Bus Operators Are Getting The Same Treatment

And this problem isn’t just on the rails.

On the bus side, too many transit agencies are drifting down the same dangerous path: delaying, burying, or quietly minimizing the very safety information operators need right now, not weeks from now.

Across many properties, when a workplace hazard is reported, agencies have as long as 15 days (HALF A MONTH) to investigate and decide what they want to say about it. Only then do they post their findings. That delay may be tied to local policy, state, OSHA, or just an agency’s decision, but the effect on frontline workers is the same: Operators are kept in the dark, and darkness is where accidents happen.

Fifteen days is a long time for a bus operator navigating traffic, dealing with assaults, mechanical defects, blind spots, and unpredictable passengers. Too much can happen in that window. Too much already has!

So, if transit agencies and railroads won’t keep us informed in real-time, we will.
If they won’t post hazards promptly, we’ll put them on the wall ourselves.
If they’re fine with our brothers and sisters finding danger the hard way, we are not.

E-3 Committee Leading the Way for Rail and Bus Alike

Last summer, SMART-TD’s Empowerment, Education, and Engagement (E-3) Committee began designing and releasing new, eye-catching, durable safety posters for Locals to display prominently in crew rooms, breakrooms, and on-duty locations. These posters make our union visible again. They highlight everything from meeting times and SMART app resources to members’ rights and union benefits.

Now, we are adding your physical safety to that list.

Safety is at the core of everything this union stands for, and it should not be hidden in a corporate database or left sitting in an agency inbox for half a month.

These posters are free to any Local that requests them, and they are built for real daily conditions: heavy lamination so they can be written on, erased, updated, and reused day after day as hazards change.

Because that’s how safety really works.
Not on a website.
Not in a spreadsheet.
On the wall, in the room, and in the conversation.

Real Hazards Require Real-Time Awareness

When a yard foreman blows a knee stepping into a hole between tracks 17 and 18, the next foreman shouldn’t learn about it a month later from a digital document buried behind mandatory training clicks or by stepping in the same damn hole.

When a bus’s lift malfunctions, a passenger is becoming a consistent security risk, a lighting outage creates a dangerous walk path, or Route 17 becomes an assault hotspot after 8pm, the next operator shouldn’t discover that by becoming the next victim.

These dangers should be known before the next shift walks on the job. But if carriers and agencies think injury prevention isn’t worth a single piece of paper, then SMART-TD will provide that paper, laminate it, and make sure every crew room, breakroom, and reporting location puts safety back where it belongs: in plain sight.

These Posters Are for YOU, Your Crew, and Your Family

These posters are more than injury reports.
They’re a platform for hazard identification, near-miss alerts, and preventative action.

Rail or bus, these posters give local officers a tool to inform members before the injury happens, not just after.

Local Officers: Lead From the Front

Every Local Chair, Legislative Rep, and officer, rail and bus, has an opportunity and a responsibility to take part in this effort.

Posting these flyers isn’t just communication.
It’s ownership.

It’s reclaiming your workplace as union space, where members look out for each other and no one walks into a hazard blind.

When the posters go up, conversations start.
When conversations start, injuries drop.
When we take safety into our own hands, everyone goes home the way they showed up.

Locals can request the new posters directly from SMART-TD using the official order form.

It’s Time to Get Loud. It’s Time to Get Visible. It’s Time to Protect Each Other Again.
No member should ever walk into the same hazard that injured a brother or sister the day before.

Together, we will make sure they never have to.