(NewsNation) — Federal safety regulations are taking center stage following a train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio. One question being asked: Could a particular type of brakes help prevent disaster?
Norfolk Southern, the company that owned the derailed train, boasted about electronically controlled pneumonic brakes in 2007, HuffPost reported. The company announced at the time it was the first in the nation to equip a freight train with the technology.
Unlike other systems, where brakes are applied sequentially along the length of a train, electronic pneumatic brakes, or ECP, work on all cars simultaneously. That can reduce the distance and time a train needs to stop and can keep some cars from derailing.
Despite once praising the technology, however, Norfolk Southern and the broader rail industry fought against regulations that would have mandated the brakes be put on certain trains.
The Obama administration in 2015 enacted a rule that required ECP brakes on trains carrying crude oil and certain hazardous materials, but only after the regulations were limited in scope following lobbying efforts. The ECP brake rules were scrapped altogether by the Trump administration.
“These ECP brakes are very important for oil trains,” rail safety expert Steven Ditmeyer said in 2018 when the regulations were rolled back. “It makes a great deal of sense: All the brakes get applied immediately, and there would be fewer cars in the pileup.”
Ditmeyer told The Lever earlier this month that the ECP brakes would have made the East Palestine, Ohio, crash less severe. Referring to the opposition within the rail industry, he said: “The railroads will test new features. But once they are told they have to do it … they don’t want to spend the money.”
The National Transportation Safety Board has confirmed to The Lever and HuffPost that the train was not equipped with ECP brakes. A preliminary report on a cause of the crash is expected in two weeks.
The train also did not qualify as a high-hazard flammable train (HHFT), a designation that triggers other federal safety requirements. The NTSB in 2014 argued for a broader definition of HHFT that covered Class 2 flammable gases — a category that includes vinyl chloride, which was being carried on the train.
The Obama-era rule covered only Class 3 flammables like ethanol and crude oil.
In opposing the 2015 regulations on mandatory ECP brakes, the Association of American Railroads said it “would be extremely costly without providing an offsetting benefit.”
The lobbying group currently says on its website that ECP brakes have a “significant” failure rate. Norfolk Southern is a member of the association.
“Worse, ECP-equipped trains that became unmovable due to ECP failures blocked the track for other trains and caused far-reaching disruptions,” the group says. “Instead, railroads have often used distributed power (locomotives placed strategically throughout a train) and end-of-train devices that allow the brake signal to reach all cars of a train more quickly than when a brake signal is sent only from the lead locomotive of a train.”
The Department of Transportation under former President Donald Trump came to the same conclusion about the costs of the ECP brakes, determining the cost would be more than three times higher than the benefits.
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg suggests his agency now has limited power to reinstate the ECP brake rule.
“We’re constrained by law on some areas of rail regulation (like the braking rule withdrawn by the Trump administration in 2018 because of a law passed by Congress in 2015),” Buttigieg tweeted this week.
He was referring to the 2015 “Fixing America’s Surface Transportation Act” passed by Congress requiring the executive branch to conduct a cost-benefit analysis of the ECP brake rule before enacting it. Once that analysis determined the costs would exceed benefits, the rule was automatically repealed.
John Risch, a former BNSF engineer and national legislative director for the Sheet Metal, Air, Rail, and Transportation Union, told The Lever that ECP brakes are the “most remarkable advancement” he ever encountered in his 31-year career.
“It needs to be implemented,” he said.
The Associated Press and NewsNation senior producer Steven Joachim contributed to this report.