By Cat Murphy
Howard Center for Investigative Journalism
WASHINGTON — BNSF Railway’s general director of rail said the company is not training its track inspection technology to find some defects regulators maintain can lead to derailments, because it would slow the company’s freight operations.
“We have thousands of these [defects] out there across our network — thousands,” Matthew Keller said at the Transportation Research Board conference in Washington, D.C., last month. “We are intentionally not going down the path of trying to find these because we know the impact it’s going to have on our network.”
The railroad could “very easily” train its existing automated inspection system to identify these track problems — known as load-bearing defects — but does not consider them a top priority, Keller said during a Jan. 13 presentation on the intersection of innovation and regulation.
“We don’t necessarily believe that this is a tremendous safety-critical item,” he said. “I am not that worried about this specific condition in the grand scheme of everything else we’ve got out there.”
Federal regulations require railroads to slow their trains around load-bearing defects, which occur when a piece of metal — usually another track component — gets jammed between the rail and the plate designed to support it.
But because implementing mandatory speed restrictions for every load-bearing defect would significantly slow its high-speed freight network, Keller said BNSF, which operates 32,500 miles of track across North America, is “nervous” to use the technology to find them.
“Each one of them that we find, that requires a 25 mph slow order,” he said. “We can teach these models to do really impressive things, but when we run up against regulation, this is an example where we’ve stopped short because of what impact it’s going to have on our network.”
Kendall Sloan, the railroad’s spokeswoman, wrote in a statement that Keller’s comments were his “personal views and opinions” and “do not represent BNSF or its position.”
BNSF “fully acknowledges” load-bearing defects, also known as concentrated load defects, as a federally regulated track defect, Sloan said.
However, Keller said at the conference that railroads and regulators likely disagreed on “how worried we should be” about these defects.
“In the grand scheme of everything we’ve got maintenance to do on, this doesn’t even hit my top-20 list,” he said. “But the regulation says something very different.”
When the University of Maryland’s Howard Center for Investigative Journalism asked Keller after his presentation for clarification on his comments, he said he used load-bearing defects as “an example of one that we have selected to not pursue, at least for right now,” with automated inspections.
“We don’t have any data that tells us that those types of defects contribute to service-failed rails, derailments, anything like that,” Keller said. “Our data points us to prioritizing different types of defects.”
This contradicts track experts, safety regulations and multiple government publications, which say load-bearing defects can cause broken rails — and lead to derailments — by placing too much of the train’s weight on one spot.
Although these breaks can develop over time, they also can cause “complete and sudden” rail failure under the weight of a train, according to the Federal Railroad Administration’s track defect manual.
The FRA declined to comment on Keller’s statements.
Keller acknowledged the need to identify and fix load-bearing defects but said BNSF wanted to do so in a way that wouldn’t “put the network on its knees.”
Tony Cardwell, the president of the labor union that represents track workers, called Keller’s comments “idiotic,” adding they “should scare everyone.”
“When you have steel between the plate and the rail, it can break the rail,” said Cardwell, a former track inspector. “How much do we want to compromise public safety to keep feeding the railroad shareholders more money?”
Keller and BNSF’s spokeswoman maintained the railroad and its track inspectors comply with the regulatory requirement to either fix the defect or slow the trains on the affected stretch of tracks.
However, a 2024 FRA investigation into “systemic defect concerns” at BNSF found load-bearing and other defects were widespread across the railroad’s network and often left off track inspection reports.
“There appeared to be a reluctance for track inspectors to report conditions found during inspection runs when the condition required a remedial action in the form of a speed restriction,” the FRA wrote in its assessment of BNSF’s safety culture.
The FRA said the defects BNSF’s inspectors repeatedly failed to report and remediate — including load-bearing defects — have the potential to cause derailments.
Sloan said BNSF acknowledges the agency’s assessment and has since made changes to its track inspector evaluation process, noting the railroad “takes safety very seriously.”
However, the FRA published a report in 2025 showing BNSF paid over $250,000 in track safety violation fines in fiscal year 2024 — more than every other Class I freight railroad combined.
Load-bearing defects are just one of many kinds of track defects. A previous investigation by the Howard Center showed over a quarter of rail accidents on or next to main line tracks are caused by track defects.
The automated inspection technology Keller described as “much, much better” than humans at identifying load-bearing and other defects is called Track Health Optical Recognition, or THOR. The system uses high-speed cameras and other advanced technology to photograph and assess track conditions from various angles. According to BNSF, its THOR units photographed 165,000 miles of track last year and found 1,900 defects.
Sloan disputed Keller’s assertion that THOR could easily be trained to pinpoint load-bearing defects, noting the system would require “significant further development” to detect them reliably.
While Sloan confirmed THOR is capable of identifying potential locations where these defects may exist, she said BNSF is “currently focused on defects we have found to be higher risk.”
This story was produced by the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism at the University of Maryland, whose work is funded by a grant from the Scripps Howard Foundation in honor of journalism pioneer Roy W. Howard.