Curtis Tate

The (Bergen County, N.J.) Record

The Trump administration has withdrawn a proposed requirement for railroads and trucking companies to test employees for obstructive sleep apnea, a disorder believed to be a factor in last year's fatal train crash at Hoboken Terminal in New Jersey.

In their announcement withdrawing the proposal Friday, the Federal Railroad Administration and the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration said they'd encourage trucking and rail companies to voluntarily screen employees involved in safety-sensitive work, such as truck drivers and train engineers, for sleep apnea.

Sleep apnea is a chronic condition that degrades the quality of sleep, resulting in daytime fatigue and drowsiness. According to the National Institutes of Health, the condition often goes undiagnosed.

Sleep apnea "can cause unintended sleep episodes and resulting deficits in attention, concentration, situational awareness, and memory, thus reducing the capacity to safely respond to hazards when performing safety sensitive duties," the agencies wrote in a notice published Friday in the Federal Register.

But they said they would not make sleep apnea screenings mandatory, as first proposed by the Obama administration in March 2016.

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Since January, President Trump has canceled hundreds of Obama-era proposed regulations, including those involving worker safety and environmental protection.

The proposed sleep apnea testing requirement stemmed from a December 2013 derailment of a Metro-North commuter train in Spuyten Duyvil, N.Y. Four people were killed when the train jumped the tracks at 82 mph on a curve limited to 30 mph.

Investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board found that the engineer, William Rockefeller, had undiagnosed sleep apnea.

That condition also may have played a role in last September's Hoboken crash, where a New Jersey Transit commuter train plowed through an end-of-track barrier at more than twice the appropriate speed. One person was killed.

The engineer in last year's crash, Thomas Gallagher, was subsequently diagnosed with sleep apnea.

The NTSB has yet to release its findings on the crash.

It's also believed that both crashes could have been avoided by Positive Train Control, a system that automatically slows or stops trains that are going too fast. NJ Transit and Metro-North are required by federal law to install the system by the end of next year.