1. “Some stuff we haul we probably shouldn’t”

An increasingly sophisticated network of railroads across the U.S. hauls more grain, oil, coal, autos, auto parts and other manufactured goods than ever before as part of a $73 billion industry that employs more than 180,000 people, according to the Association of American Railroads, or AAR, an industry trade group.

The deregulation of the railroad industry in 1980 with the Staggers Act produced mergers and takeovers of unprofitable and bankrupt lines, and routes have consolidated rail transport in the hands of just seven major U.S. carriers — the biggest being Union Pacific UNP, -0.91% , Burlington Northern Santa Fe (owned by Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway BRK.A, +0.36% BRK.B, +0.07% , CSX Transportation CSX, +0.41% , Kansas City Southern KSU, -0.92% and Norfolk Southern NSC, -0.85% .

Deregulation has generally made rail transport more economical than trucking. As a result, most exports from China and the Far East roll off container ships and straight on to double-stack cargo trains around the clock, while shipments of ethanol and Bakken crude oil rumble out of Montana and North Dakota destined for Pacific, Atlantic and Gulf seaports. Even PepsiCo’s PEP, -1.29% Tropicana orange juice from Florida heads up the Eastern Seaboard, to the Ohio Valley and even California nearly a dozen times a week in hundred-car-long refrigerated “juice trains.”

While overall safety for railroads has increased dramatically over the years — train accidents have fallen 80% since 1980 and are down 46% since 2000 — the recent surge in crude oil transportation incidents by rail is one blemish the railroad industry would probably rather not trumpet.

The U.S. now produces more than 9 million barrels of oil a day, the most since the 1970s, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, and rail transport of crude oil has jumped even more dramatically, with nearly 450,000 carloads of crude oil transported in 2013, nearly double the amount transported in 2012 and up from virtually zero in 2005, when the Bakken shale oil fields were undeveloped.

Not surprisingly, the number of trains spilling oil as a result of derailments and other incidents such as yard collisions has jumped as well, with more than 140 “unintentional releases” in 2014, according to the federal Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, which, along with the Federal Railroad Administration, regulates transportation of crude oil by rail. By comparison, between 1975 and 2012, U.S. railroads averaged just 25 spills a year.

“We have a new ballgame in many ways,” says Fred Millar, a railroad safety consultant in Arlington, Va., who says while freight railroads have indeed reduced hazardous materials (HAZMAT) safety violations and incidents, when it comes to oil “it’s a different animal because they are using unit trains,” sometimes made up of more than 100 cars, he said, as transporting a few oil cars in manifest trains is inefficient and not enough pipelines exist to carry the new oil bounty. “The infrastructure is simply not ready for this,” he said.

Typically, hazardous materials such as chlorine, sulfuric and hydrochloric acid travel by rail, but only in a few cars of a single train, and they’re usually in the middle, where they’re less vulnerable to collisions and unlikely to injure the crew. (For example, you won’t see a car loaded with telephone poles next to a tank car loaded with flammable liquid, so as to reduce the risk of a puncture.) Still, in 2013, oil spills from derailments in North Dakota and Alabama led to more than 1.4 million gallons of crude oil leaking from tank cars. All told there were 23 crude-related rail accidents in 2013, though not all released oil. However, in July of the same year, an 72-car oil-laden train lost its brakes in Lac-Megantic, Quebec, derailed and exploded, killing 47 people and incinerating much of the town.

“Trains are not a very reliable way to move liquid product,” said Eric de Place, policy director of the Seattle-based Sightline Institute, who said that the opposition to building pipelines such as Keystone Pipeline is ironically forcing more dangerous product to travel by rail. “If its milk, that’s one thing, but even if the adjusted spill rate has gone down, the incidents are catastrophic enough,” he said. “We’re likely to see smaller volume spills when we use pipelines versus a train,” he said.

Ed Greenberg, a spokesman for the Association of American Railroads, said that more that 99.995% of rail cars containing crude oil arrive safely and that the industry is working with the federal government and first responders to make oil unit transport by rail safer by increasing track inspections along oil routes as well as installation of wheel bearing detectors that alert railroads to problems with rail cars.

2. “We might be asleep at the switch (literally)”

Imagine being woken up in the middle of the night and being told you’re moving a 70,000 ton train with six locomotives and more than 100 cars across the country in a few hours. Welcome to the life of a freight rail crewmen.

For most engineers, conductors, brakemen and switchmen, the unpredictable hours of freight railroading are offset by the good union pay, generous number of vacation days and health benefits. About 85% of freight railroad employees belong to a union and in 2012 on average made $109,700 a year with benefits, compared with $69,200 for other full-time U.S. workers. But it has gotten tougher, as increased traffic is leading to more fatigue, and calls to do more with fewer workers as rail crews shrink from five members to sometimes as few as one. As a result, nights with seven to eight hours of sleep are a rarity for most industry workers, and a 50 hour-plus workweek is the norm.

“I go to work any time, day or night,” said Mark Kramer, a Union Pacific engineer told the RailroaderSleep.org website, a resource guide sponsored by the FRA. “Our work isn’t a job — it’s more a way of life. You know you’re going to work a lot at night, and it’s going to be hard to stay awake, and that part of the work is difficult.” To that end, railroad unions have made efforts to promote healthy lifestyles for its members, including encouraging naps and making homes a more sleep-promoting environment with darkened curtains.

“Even if you’ve been in the industry for 30 years, “your body is never used to trying to sleep in the middle of the day or in the early evening.” said Kramer.

Indeed, while the trend of “human factor-caused” accidents (many of which are fatigue-related) has dropped by more than 30% since 2006 to 678 incidents in 2014, they still make up about a third of all railroad accidents each year, according to safety data from the FRA.

In April 2011 near Red Oak, Iowa, a BNSF coal train collided with a maintenance train, killing both crewmembers, after they had fallen asleep due to fatigue as a result of their irregular work schedules, according to the National Transportation Safety Board, which investigated the incident. The NTSB has attributed crew fatigue to at least eight major train crashes since 2000.

Federal laws require that freight rail engineers and conductors must go off duty after 12 consecutive hours on the job and must have 10 hours off duty before they can report for their next assignment. And if they work seven days in a row, they’re required to have three days off before they have to report again.

For its part, the Association of American Railroads says that railroads need to provide environments that allow employees maximum rest during off-hours, including having employees start their shift in the mornings, rather than the middle of the night. “Railroads want properly rested crews, it’s not in a railroad’s best interest to have employees who are too tired to perform their duties properly,” the AAR said in a May 2014 background paper.

But the increased demands of railroad traffic and volume haven’t made it easier, as freight crewmen for the most part can’t call in “tired.”

Many railroads “do not allow locomotive engineers and conductors who are caught without proper rest due to a bad lineup to refuse that call, or ‘lay off’ for that trip, due to being fatigued,” Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen’s (BLET) president Dennis Pierce wrote to National Transportation Safety Board Chairman Christopher Hart in March.

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3. “We won’t always tell you what we’re carrying or when it’s coming through.”

For 73 year-old Judith Studebaker of Holly Hills, Mo., the increased train traffic just 100 feet from her house aroused her curiosity. While living in her house for over 17 years, she normally counted on seeing just one or two Amtrak passenger trains each day, and an occasional freight train at night. Then this past year in a nine month stretch, she counted more than 150 northbound freight trains with the DOT HAZMAT Class 3 placard of “1267” affixed to each of the tank cars rumbling behind her house. “It was crude oil,” she said. “You can imagine how upset we were.”

Not only was she upset, but so was the St. Louis Fire Department’s chief, Dennis Jenkerson, when he found out last year what the Union Pacific and BNSF trains were carrying through his city. “We’ve got three million gallons of product coming through this town on a regular basis,” he said in an interview. “I don’t want 100 cars coming through the city,” he said. While he said the City of St. Louis Fire Department’s 900-plus members routinely train for tank car accidents, he said even a city his size is not equipped for an oil unit train derailing without shutting Lambert St. Louis International Airport in order to bring enough foam-throwing trucks to an accident, which typically involves as many as nine tank cars derailing, with several spilling highly flammable product and catching fire. “I know I’m going to lose a lot of neighborhood,” if that happens, he said. Union Pacific spokesman Mark Davis said that trains that ran through Holly Hills were only hauling empty tank cars, not fully-laden ones. Still, the “empty” tank cars carried about 3,000 gallons of crude oil product.

In April at a House Oversight Committee hearing, NTSB chairman Christopher Hart said “firefighters had no idea these cargos were traveling through their towns.”

Read: Railroads’ guarded secret: Not even HAZMAT teams are told what’s on train

Sean Guard, the mayor of Washougal, Wash., has been camping out beside BNSF tracks running through his town along the Columbia River to count how many oil unit trains are coming through because he says the railroads won’t tell him. “They’ve been respectfully uncooperative,” he said. “They’ve told me ‘we appreciate the question but it’s proprietary.’” Guard notes that the trains are so long that “when the unit trains come through, all our crossings get shut down,” tying up traffic in the Clark County town of 14,000, just east of Portland, Oregon.

Guard says with three elementary schools and nearly 90% of the town’s population within a half-mile of the tracks, he’s worried that neither BNSF nor his town’s firefighters have an alternative way to put out an oil fire caused by a derailment other than to stand back and let the fire burn out. “That’s not really encouraging,” he said. While BNSF has sent three of the town’s 53 firefighters to special oil fire training established by the Association of American Railroads in Boulder, Colo., at the company’s expense, Guard says his town deserves more. “We don’t want to stand in the way of jobs, [but] we want to know that it’s safe,” he said. “We want to know there are real plans in place rather than watch it burn.”

Gus Melonas, a spokesman for BNSF said it’s company policy not to disclose information on trains and cargoes unless there is a need to know by first responders and he said the policy has become even more urgent because of recent anti-oil train protests that have blocked tracks and threatened derailments.

In response, the Department of Transportation and its related agencies, including the FRA and PHMSA, announced on April 17 that trains with more than 35 loaded cars of flammable liquids, which includes Bakken crude, cannot travel more than 40 miles an hour in most urban areas and that railroads must make available detailed information about the train’s cargo within 90 minutes in case of an accident, as well as the makeup of the train including the specifications of tank cars that are carrying dangerous products. In addition, the DOT announced on May 1 that all high-hazard flammable trains (HHFT’s), which include oil unit trains, can’t travel more than 50 miles an hour in all areas.

Wreckage burns after a freight train loaded with oil derailed in Lac-Megantic, Quebec. AFP/Getty Images

4. “We may not own the cars we haul. And some may be unsafe.”

The steam era of railroads hauling dozens of brightly lettered boxcars and tank cars with their own name on it has gone, well, by the way of the steam era, as the remaining railroads have found it cheaper to lease cars that are maintained by third parties such as Chicago-based CIT Group CIT, -1.96% and GATX.

That has made it cheaper for the railroads to operate, as they’re no longer responsible for maintaining cars and instead can focus on all-important track maintenance.

But the use of leased rail cars has been at the heart of the oil unit train controversy ever since the 2013 derailment and explosion in Lac Megantic, Quebec. The demand for tank cars to ship Bakken shale crude oil has led to tens of thousands of older tank cars being put into service by leasing companies such as Union Tank Car, which, like Burlington Northern Santa Fe, is owned by Berkshire Hathaway.

The tank cars that exploded and burned in Quebec were so-called DOT-111 or CPC-1232 “legacy” cars which had thin puncture-sensitive walls and ends, no internal thermal jackets for heat protection, and unprotected drain valves at the bottom of the tank cars that were often sheared off in derailments.

The latest crash occurred on May 7, 2015 when a fully loaded BNSF unit train carrying crude oil in unjacketed CPC-1232 “legacy” tank cars derailed and burned, forcing the evacuation of the small town of Heimdal, North Dakota and surrounding farms.

“The DOT-111 is a pop-can on wheels,” said Eric de Place, a researcher at the Sightline Institute in Seattle, a non-profit research group that tracks rail spills of crude oil. “The industry has been putting cars into service that are not suitable,” he said. “The fireballs in the last year show they shouldn’t be used for this,” he said.

Ed Greenberg, a spokesman for the AAR says the railroad industry fully supports replacing the DOT-111 and CPC-1232 tank cars in service that are carrying crude oil and notes that the railroads voluntarily began retrofitting tank cars in 2011 to make them safer, but up until just this month have been waiting on federal regulators like FRA and PHMSA to develop a new standard, who in turn in April were lambasted by members of Congress in both parties for what members called unacceptable delays.

“Four years is too long,” said Jeff Denham, a California Republican who chairs the House Transportation & Infrastructure Committee’s subpanel on railroads, pipelines and hazardous materials. “The industry is crying out for a federal standard on these tank cars,” he said.

After several other incidents of DOT-111 tank cars performing poorly in derailments and spilling products, Burlington Northern Santa Fe in 2014 agreed to buy 5,000 of its own oil-tank cars, but held off as the FRA and PHMSA, which share jurisdiction over tank car safety regulations, finally agreed on a new safety standard since it was first proposed in 2011.

While the U.S. and Canadian standards for new and retrofitted tank cars were announced on May 1 — they include thicker steel shells, thermal protection to protect a car’s flammable cargo for more than three hours from an outside heat source and better protection for valves and fittings — the oldest, most vulnerable cars carrying crude oil won’t need to be completely retrofitted until May 2017 and some others not until April 2020. And cars hauling other flammable liquids like ethanol don’t need to be retrofitted until July 2023.

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5. “Wave to the engineer while you can.”

Waving to the engineer in the cab as the train goes by may soon be a thing of the past. Already many railroads use robot switchers in yards to move and assemble longer cars.

But it won’t be long until some long-distance freight trains have just one crewman aboard.

Many railroads are moving towards actually eliminating the second crewman, namely the conductor, leaving just the engineer to drive the train, walk the length of the cars to check that air hoses are connected and cars are coupled properly. But the move towards one-person train operation has not only encountered stiff opposition from railroad unions, who fear the loss of jobs, and safety advocates like Fred Millar, who point out that the July 2013 Lac-Megantic crude oil disaster that killed 47 people was partially a result of a one-man train operation where perhaps because of fatigue or poor training, the engineer only set fewer than a dozen car handbrakes on a fully loaded 72-car oil train parked on a downslope after one of the locomotives pulling the train broke down. “This is a sensationally poor time to propose something like this,” he said.

Matt Krogh, an activist with the group ForestEthics in Bellingham, Wash., says that the railroads make a profit of as much as $1.1 million on each oil train, while an additional crewman would cost just $3,500 a trip and remain the all-important extra set of eyes now that the traditional caboose has been long gone as well. “You’re really going to have just one person on board to drive the train and be the one who also walks a half mile back along the track to find out what’s wrong?” he said.

The AAR says that any issue with single-crewed trains should be worked out between the individual railroads and their labor unions, such as the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen. (BLET)

Rail unions like BLET are actually trying to make two-person crews mandatory, with the introduction of legislation in Congress on April 13 that would require one engineer and one conductor on all freight trains.

“The BLET continues to oppose and condemn single-person freight operations as adverse to worker and public safety,” BLET President Dennis Pierce said in an April 13 statement. “As things stand today, the only ways to end one-person train operations are federal laws or regulations that outlaw this dangerous practice, or collectively bargained contract language that requires two crew members on every train, he said.

The wreckage of a Metro-North commuter train lies on its side after it derailed just outside of New York City. Getty Images

6. “We love high technology, except when we don’t.”

Remember when you ran your HO-scale or Lionel trains by remote control? Well, the railroad industry wants to do something similar with real trains. Railroads are currently investing millions of dollars in what’s known as Positive Train Control (PTC) in an effort to improve safety and reduce the risk of collisions by allowing remote operators at dispatch centers to control trains if the onboard crew is incapacitated or misses a signal.

“PTC is designed to automatically stop or slow a train before certain accidents caused by human error, occur,” said Ed Greenberg of AAR. Greenberg said the system is designed to prevent situations like train-to-train collisions, derailments caused by excessive speed and other incidents where human error is a contributing factor. The five biggest railroads in the U.S. have already spent more than $5.2 billion on the technology, and more is expected to come, he said. The AAR says that using PTC will help with issues of fatigue as it can stop trains if a tired train crew misses a signal. The trade group says that PTC will also allow safe one-person operation of trains.

Still, one place where the biggest railroads don’t agree is a new piece of technology called electronically controlled pneumatic (ECP) brakes, which uses computerized systems to apply the train’s air brakes simultaneously, rather than in a domino-fashion, one car at a time, from the cab. ECP braking has the advantage of eliminating the pulling and pushing of cars during the braking process, which not only saves wear and tear but can help reduce derailments.

And on May 1, the DOT, as part of its rule on oil-unit train operation, required that trains with 70 or more loaded tank cars with flammable liquids be equipped with ECP systems by January 2021. “We are strident that this is a good technology and one that is useful,” said DOT Secretary Anthony Foxx at the announcement of the final rule.

Albert Neupaver, president of Wilmerding, Pennsylvania-based Wabtec Corp. WAB, -1.45% , one of the makers of the new ECP braking devices, said that the system costs about $4,000 to $6,000 per freight car, though the locomotives must also equipped as well, which adds another $30,000 to $50,000. http://www.wabtec.com/railroad/ecpb.asp

The freight railroad industry was taken by surprise by the ECP braking requirement, saying it’s still not reliable enough yet and has only been tested on a handful of coal unit trains operated by BNSF and Norfolk Southern, while Union Pacific, the second-largest hauler of crude oil behind BNSF has not used it at all. “The DOT has no substantial evidence to support a safety justification for mandating ECP brakes, which will not prevent accidents,” said Edward R. Hamberger, AAR president and CEO, after the DOT rule was released. “The DOT couldn’t make a safety case for ECP but forged ahead anyhow. This is an imprudent decision made without supporting data or analysis. I have a hard time believing the determination to impose ECP brakes is anything but a rash rush to judgment.”

Greenberg, the AAR spokesman added that train operators have addressed the “domino” issue by having end-of-train devices that apply brakes, as well as locomotives distributed at the head, middle and end of unit trains to apply braking power more evenly as well as using so-called “dynamic braking” where the locomotives are turned into giant generators where the energy is dissipated as heat through vents in the top of the locomotive.

“Railroads already have addressed braking systems for trains moving crude oil, using either distributed power or end-of-train devices. Freight railroads also have transitioned from a reliance solely on air brakes to the use of dynamic brakes, providing measurable safety benefits, and preserving air reserves for emergency activation,” Greenberg said.

Still, one of the biggest railroad wrecks ever occurred when a Southern Pacific (now Union Pacific) freight train’s friction and dynamic brakes failed at the same time, killing two crewmen and two young boys who were crushed when the train derailed onto their house in San Bernardino, Calif., in 1989. Nearly two weeks after the derailment, a damaged pipeline at the site of the accident ruptured, killing another two people.

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7. “We could be the reason your train is late much of the time”

With the exception of the high-speed Acela rail tracks of the Northeast Corridor that run between Washington, D.C. and Boston, more than 97% of the passenger rail system in the U.S. run on routes that are maintained and operated by freight rail companies.

Amtrak hauled a record 31.6 million passengers in 2013, but that began to slip last year, as often their trains were delayed as a result of freight traffic, especially oil unit trains. And the situation is likely to get worse, as 70% of Amtrak’s routes are on freight rail lines and freight rail traffic is expected to jump from 19.7 billion tons to 22.1 billion tons by 2020. For example, on one stretch of Norfolk-Southern owned track in Indiana, trains are delayed seven minutes for every 10 miles they travel, according to Amtrak’s own data on delays, helping to push Amtrak losses into hundreds of millions of dollars a year. In November 2014, Amtrak filed a complaint with the federal Surface Transportation Board to investigate Norfolk Southern and CSX for routinely delaying its Capitol Limited route between Washington D.C. and Chicago for as much as four hours at a time.

Freight railroads, while saying they support passenger rail, are adamant about making sure rails are clear for their freight trains. “If the expansion of passenger rail service were to impede freight railroads, our economic health and global competitiveness would suffer greatly,” AAR said in a position paper. Freight railroads also demand that they be protected from liability when passenger trains use their rails even though some of the worst passenger rail disasters were partly attributable to faulty rail maintenance by freight railroads, including a July 2002 incident in Kensington, Md. where Amtrak’s Capitol Limited passenger train derailed because of poor track maintenance by CSX, causing more than 100 injuries.

Amtrak won a victory in March when the Supreme Court overturned a lower court’s decision to throw out a provision in the Passenger Rail Investment and Improvement Act (PRIIA) that allowed Amtrak to demand an investigation when it believes freight railroads are illegally giving their own trains priority.

Delays occur less often in states like California that have invested in improving Amtrak’s performance by adding additional trains, tracks and more frequent crossovers so that passenger trains can get around stalled or waiting freight trains. In addition, states like Massachusetts are buying trackage from freight railroads directly to control scheduling along commuter rail lines like the MTBA.

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8. “Not many women are working on this railroad.”

During World War II, it wasn’t uncommon to see trains crewed by women, as most men had gone off to war. Southern Pacific (now part of Union Pacific) was one of the first railroads to hire women as engineers, but many railroads didn’t hire women engineers until the 1970s.

Christene Gonzales was one of the first Hispanic women hired as an engineer by the then Santa Fe Railway in 1973. “It was certainly something, to take off on that train with everyone watching you and knowing you did it,” she recalls. “And knowing your hard work was starting to pay off.”

And even though American railroads expect to hire 15,000 men and women in 2015, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, you’re more likely to encounter a female airline pilot than a railroad engineer. Of the 55,000 locomotive engineers in the U.S. in 2014, just 1.4% were women, according to the Department of Labor’s BLS, compared with 7.2% of the 133,000 commercial pilots and flight engineers in the U.S. Amtrak’s record on female engineer hiring is a bit better, with women comprising 6.2% of the passenger railroad’s engineers

Nevertheless, earlier this year, Sarah Feinberg was named just the second female administrator of the FRA since the agency’s founding in 1966, though some critics have claimed that the former chief of staff for the DOT doesn’t have enough rail experience to be the long-term chief at the regulatory agency.

9. “Want to be an engineer? Just climb aboard and open the door.”

Because of federal rules that require certain hours of rest after long periods of work, many trains must simply stop wherever they are until a relief crew can be obtained. “They stop the train and walk away,” said Matt Krogh of ForestEthics.

In 2011, a KOMO news investigation showed many Burlington Northern Santa Fe trains in the Seattle region were unlocked and unguarded, even as many were carrying toxic chemicals and other hazardous materials.

Ed Greenberg, the spokesman for the Association of American Railroads, said that freight railroads implemented additional train securement procedures starting in August 2013 on mainline track and sidings, which included the locking of locomotive cabs.

10. “We’re a terrorist target.”

The unlocked trains issue, and the fact that there are more than 140,000 miles of railroad in the U.S., are just two of the reasons why the Department of Homeland Security considers both freight and passenger trains to be a major target of terrorism. Besides bringing bombs on passenger trains, the industry acknowledges there are simpler ways to derail trains, from removing spikes from tracks, to simply leaving obstacles on the tracks. Documents seized by Navy SEALs during the 2011 raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan show al-Qaida had plans to derail trains on the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11th terror attacks.

“We spend 98% of our money on aviation security and 2% on rail security,” said then-Senator Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey during a 2011 Amtrak hearing. “We know that rail targets are soft points for terrorists.”

In April 2013, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police arrested two suspected Al-Qaeda-affiliated men who were alleged to be plotting to derail a government-owned Via Rail Canada passenger train near Toronto by attempting to weaken a railway bridge in September 2012.

The AAR says it has developed a “railway alert network” with four levels of awareness and response that’s used by all North American railroads. These include how to recognize IEDs, unusual vehicles or objects on the tracks and other forms of sabotage or terrorist tactics. Railroad companies have also updated their computer systems against cyber-attacks and other hacking.

Moreover, while there are ways to detect track-tampering through fiber-optic cables that could detect the removal of a spike or connector, passenger railroads like Amtrak say the cost of such a system could be prohibitive and would take away from other efforts, such as increasing police patrols and adding more bomb-sniffing dogs aboard trains.