Railroads urged to examine detectors

OMAHA, Nebraska — Freight railroad companies should review the way they use and maintain detectors along tracks that are supposed to spot overheating bearings, federal regulators said, in the wake of a fiery Ohio derailment and other recent crashes.

The safety notice from the Federal Railroad Administration on Tuesday stopped short of telling railroad companies exactly what to do. Instead, it encouraged them to ensure that the detectors are being inspected often enough by trained employees and that the companies have safety standards for determining when to stop a train or park a railcar when a warning is triggered.

The National Transportation Safety Board has said the crew operating the Norfolk Southern train that derailed outside East Palestine, Ohio, near the Pennsylvania border, on Feb 3, received a warning from such a detector but could not stop the train before more than three dozen cars came off the tracks and caught fire. The Federal Railroad Administration, or FRA, said overheating bearings had probably caused at least four other derailments since 2021.

In the Ohio derailment the bearing that failed became hotter as it passed three detectors before the crash but did not become hot enough to set off a warning until the last detector, the National Transportation Safety Board said. The railroad administration said the companies should consider developing ways to analyze temperature trends those sensors spot to help identify potential problems sooner.

Unsurprising move

Dave Clarke, former director of the Center for Transportation Research at the University of Tennessee, said the safety advisory was unsurprising.

"This is just FRA proposing the obvious, in my opinion. I doubt if any Class I (major freight railroad) was waiting for this," he said.

Allan Zarembski, a professor who leads the University of Delaware's rail engineering and safety program, said overheating bearings cause only a handful of the more than 1,000 derailments in the US each year, indicating that the existing system already finds nearly all such problems.

"There's great political pressure to do something now," Zarembski said. "(It is a) knee-jerk reaction. 'Do something now. We've got to do something now.' But I'm not convinced the knee-jerk reaction is going to do a lot of good."

The Ohio derailment forced half the town of about 5,000 people to evacuate for days.

Agencies Via Xinhua