By Cait Kelley
Howard Center for Investigative Journalism
Two and a half years after a derailed train spewed toxic gases across eastern Ohio, none of the nation’s largest freight railroads have fulfilled promises to join a voluntary federal close call program designed to reduce rail hazards and prevent accidents.
Two railroads — BNSF and Norfolk Southern — launched partial trials, but haven’t fully joined the program. A federal working group formed to negotiate railroad participation recently disbanded.
Railroads complained that the safety program — which lets employees report safety issues and close calls without facing discipline — was cumbersome and no better than their own internal processes.
But Amtrak and smaller freight and passenger railroads across the country do participate and studies show the program reduced accidents by approximately 20 percent.
Program advocates say the big “Class I” freight railroads’ reluctance to participate shows the industry failed to learn any lessons from the 38-car derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, in 2023 that engulfed 35 cars in flames and forced the evacuation of homes in a 1-mile radius.
“We had an opportunity as a group to make things better and make things safer, and we didn’t do it,” said Jim Mathews, president and CEO of the advocacy organization the Rail Passengers Association. He served on the disbanded working group.
“Think about how much better and how much safer it could be if we could add all of those 120,000 employees into the mix and all of those operations of hundreds and hundreds of trains a day all across the country,” Mathews said.
What is C³RS?
The federal initiative known as the Confidential Close Call Reporting System, or C³RS, was initially inspired by a similar program in aviation started in 1976 that has helped make flying the safest form of travel in the United States. NASA, an independent third party that administers both the aviation and rail programs, said the “highly successful” aviation program has inspired similar programs in more than a dozen countries.
Federal transportation agencies argue the rail program could similarly improve safety for passengers, workers and the more than 12,000 communities that can have dangerous chemicals passing through their backyards on freight trains every day.
For the last decade, more than 1,000 trains have derailed every year in the United States, and one accident a day, on average, surpasses $100,000 in damages, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation.
After seven years of pilot programs, the federal close call program for railroads officially launched in 2014. Today, 24 freight and passenger railroads, including Amtrak, participate.
The Class I railroads BNSF and Norfolk Southern also participate in C³RS through pilot programs, which they launched after the derailment in East Palestine. However, no Class I freight railroad has ever continued with C³RS past a pilot.
To join the voluntary program, railroads negotiate an agreement with the Federal Railroad Administration, or the FRA, and the unions that represent different types of rail workers, like the dispatchers, the engineers, or the yardmasters.
The government defines Class I railroads today as those that earn more than $1.07 billion in annual revenue. Amtrak is the only Class I passenger railroad, while there are six Class I freight railroads. As of 2023, they account for about 90 percent of freight revenue in the country, and about 90 percent of freight rail workers.
For years, the National Transportation Safety Board, or the NTSB, has said railroads need a program that allows employees to report mistakes or close calls without facing discipline, arguing similar programs save lives in other industries.
The NTSB said in investigation reports that a program like C³RS could have prevented accidents in Bridgeport and West Haven, Connecticut, in 2013, and in Chester, Pennsylvania, in 2016 that in total killed three people and injured more than 100.
The deadly passenger train crash nine years ago in Chester, Pennsylvania, illustrates how.
On April 3, 2016, an Amtrak train barreled down a track near Chester, Pennsylvania, at an authorized speed of over 100 miles per hour. By the time the train engineer saw workers and equipment on the track and engaged the emergency brake, it was too late. The train hit a backhoe with a worker inside at 99 miles per hour. That worker and the track supervisor, who was hit by debris, were killed and 39 other people were injured.
Amtrak had joined C³RS, but in the midst of contentious contract negotiations and a strict new Amtrak zero-tolerance safety policy, rail unions had temporarily opted out of the close call program and a separate peer-to-peer safety feedback program.
The NTSB investigation of the accident revealed more than two dozen unsafe conditions, “many involving safety rule violations and risky behaviors by workers” across several levels of Amtrak’s organization, including track maintenance workers and dispatchers and management. The NTSB observed “an inconsistent vision of safety throughout the organization, hostile attitudes between labor and management about no-tolerance rule violations, and ill-equipped work crews.”
The NTSB found that if an effective reporting program like C³RS had been in place, Amtrak officials would have been aware of the dangerous conditions that led to the accident.
The close call reporting system is meant to not only identify safety concerns, but also increase the kind of collaboration between labor and management that the NTSB said was missing in their investigation of the Chester accident.
The FRA was partly motivated to develop its close call program because “concern of litigation and a blame-based safety culture in the railroad industry have prevented free and open discussion of dangerous conditions and how they might be eliminated,” it said in a report about C³RS in 2019.
In the rail industry, workers can only receive compensation for workplace injuries if they can negotiate a settlement with the railroad or prove in court that the railroad was legally negligent. “This created a strong financial incentive for each side to directly blame the other, inhibiting the free and open discussion needed to understand why an incident happened,” the FRA said in the report.
Through C³RS, workers can file reports of minor rule violations, mistakes, close calls and malfunctioning equipment with NASA, the aeronautics and space agency that runs the program for the railroad administration. As long as those reports meet several requirements, like no one was hurt, no hazardous materials were released, or the employee didn’t wilfully break the law like drinking on the job, then the employee receives protection from disciplinary action if they broke procedure.
“We know that our employees make mistakes. They work hard to prevent those mistakes, but they do happen,” Leslie Radanovich said in an interview with the Howard Center.
Radanovich manages system safety at Metrolink, a passenger railroad in Southern California that joined C³RS in 2023. A Metrolink spokesperson said employees have made more than 300 C³RS reports so far and Radanovich said the program has gotten more popular over time.
Radanovich said she thinks of rail safety like an iceberg. On the surface are the written values of the company and the organization’s processes and policies. Under the waterline are the “unwritten rules, shared assumptions, behaviors that may go unnoticed,” she said.
“I really think that C³RS allows us to see the whole picture and I think any organization could probably benefit from that,” she said.
After an employee submits a report, railroad safety experts at NASA de-identify the report and turn it over to a peer review team made up of representatives from the railroad, the FRA and the employees. That team determines why the unsafe event occurred and recommends how a similar situation could be avoided in the future. De-identified reports are also published in a public database that can be used to identify safety issues across the industry.
The FRA sponsored a study of C³RS involving four pilot programs with two freight and two passenger railroads between 2007 and 2014. The agency concluded that if management and labor are both supportive, then the close call program can reduce derailments, injuries and expensive disciplinary hearings and improve safety culture.
After the pilots, the two passenger railroads, Metro-North Railroad and Amtrak, stayed in C³RS. The two Class I freight railroads, Canadian Pacific — since merged with Kansas City Southern to form CPKC — and Union Pacific, did not.
In an email statement explaining why, a representative of Union Pacific wrote: “Union Pacific has had a robust internal close call reporting system in place for more than a decade, and we already collaborate with the FRA. Waiting for information to return to the railroad from a federal system removes the immediacy needed to successfully respond to concerns.”
A representative of CPKC also said in an email that the railroad has its own internal close call program and after the pilot, “[Canadian Pacific] provided feedback to FRA about improvements to the program, including the need for the program to identify safety trends and provide timely information.”
Still, all six Class I freight railroads committed to joining the federal program in 2023 after the toxic derailment in East Palestine, Ohio. However, they outlined several areas in which they argued C³RS needed to be improved or changed, arguing C³RS is inefficient and slow, less effective than their own internal programs and the program could allow employees to take advantage of the system and become so-called “repeat offenders.”
The FRA formed a working group of railroad, labor and federal representatives to hash out those details, but after two years discussions stalled and the FRA ended the group. An email sent to working group members in March said the group had “reached an impasse” and “further meetings will not likely produce meaningful results.”
Group members, including the FRA, union representatives and Mathews, argue that the main roadblock in the discussions was the Class I railroads and their lobbyists.
Why haven’t the largest freight railroads joined the program?
Mathews said the Class I freight railroads incorrectly assume a punitive approach to safety gets the best results.
“They are absolutely convinced that the key to a safe railroad is to punish employees first,” Mathews said. “And we know, not just from the short lines and from Amtrak and from the commuter railroads but from half a century of aviation data, that that’s not the right answer.”
Vince Verna, a former railroad engineer and a national legislative representative for the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen, one of the largest rail unions, said he heard a common refrain from the biggest freight railroads while serving on the C³RS working group. He said railroad representatives and lobbyists call C³RS a “get-out-of-jail-free” program for employees.
“It’s not a ‘get-out-of-jail-free’ program, it’s a don’t-shoot-the-messenger program,” he said.
Verna said the Class I railroads have never presented evidence of employees abusing the close call program. Still, for the sake of getting pilots off the ground, BLET and other rail unions have included a two-time limit on how often an employee can report and receive immunity for certain types of events.
Formal studies have found C³RS to be effective in various ways.
A 2022 Government Accountability Office study, for instance, interviewed participating railroads and found C³RS improved safety culture and trust between labor and management and identified previously unknown safety issues.
A 2024 Volpe National Transportation Systems Center report highlighted specific safety reforms that came out of the program. One railroad, for instance, developed a new form of training in which employees act out scenarios from C³RS reports and get feedback on their actions from training instructors and experienced employees. Other railroads have since adopted this training.
FRA analysis published in 2024 shows that participating railroads have seen an approximate 20 percent reduction in total train accidents or incidents per million train miles since participating in the close call program, compared with a 3 percent reduction over the same period for non-participating railroads. And in several early pilot programs, derailments were reduced by as much as 40 percent.
Though a few members of Congress have tried to mandate C³RS in the past, current rail safety legislation is stalled in Congress and the Trump administration has generally favored less regulation, not more.
What’s next for the close call program?
Every Class I railroad declined requests for interviews with the Howard Center about C³RS.
Scott Bunten, a Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen general chairman, helps coordinate a trial program with Norfolk Southern. He said it would work better if all rail workers were included.
“If we could get all the [workers] involved in it, maybe we could avoid an East Palestine in the future,” Bunten said.
“We go through a lot of people’s backyards on the railroad. I think the general public doesn’t know it, but they have a huge stake in C³RS as well,” he added.
Haley Parsley of the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism at the University of Maryland contributed additional reporting for this story.
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