The latest attack on the Railway Safety Act asks the public to believe that stronger rail safety standards are just a backdoor jobs program for unions. In an April 6 article published in Railway Age, Thomas Aiello of the National Taxpayers Union argues that the Railway Safety Act imposes unnecessary costs while doing little to improve safety. It is a familiar argument. When rail carriers and their allies do not want to meet a higher safety standard, they repackage the cost of prevention as an economic threat and portray the workers raising the alarm as self-interested. That is exactly what is happening here. Rail lobbyists position the bill as a burden on freight railroads, dismisses two-person crews as unnecessary, and treats hot bearing detector (HBD) spacing requirements as an expensive giveaway to labor. That framing collapses the moment you compare it to the rail industry’s own history. On HBDs, the industry cannot credibly claim that tighter spacing is some radical invention of organized labor. A December 2017 Transportation Technology Center, Inc. (TTCI) spacing study, conducted with the University of Illinois, concluded that 15 miles was the ideal spacing for defect detector deployment, and that detection performance declined beyond 15 miles (1). TTCI was not some outside advocacy group. TTCI was a wholly owned subsidiary of the Association of American Railroads (AAR) (2). That matters because the argument against HBD spacing mandates depends on pretending there is no serious safety basis for them. There is. In fact, after East Palestine, AAR…
