In a major story in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution this week with the headline, “Norfolk Southern doesn’t have the crews to keep trains moving, union says,” BLET National President Mark Wallace charged that NS “doesn’t have the needed manpower to keep trains running the way they should. They can’t run normal operations.”
The article documented NS’s ongoing operational deficiencies that have caused network velocity, a key indicator of service performance, to drop to low levels. Network velocity had fallen from more than 24 mph at the start of the year to 19 mph in the last week of May. Operations declined to such an extent that John Orr, the railroad’s Chief Operating Officer, resigned at the end of last month.
While some of the slowdown can be attributed to the brutal winter of 2026, much of the decline is due to short staffing. “It’s hard to retain new hires, younger workers are walking away, mid-level folks are quitting. The workforce that has remained is exhausted. Engineers and other railroaders can’t get time off — even for a day,” Wallace told the Atlanta newspaper. The staffing shortage is forcing the carrier to offer bonus incentives to employees to sell vacation and to step up during their rest days on the weekends.
The railroad has failed to hire enough conductors to keep up with normal attrition and then experienced volume levels they cannot support. Adding to staffing problems and low morale, NS is forcing conductor trainees through the training program at an accelerated pace that has caused additional issues related to safety and service.
Cutting corners on safety combined with worker fatigue, Wallace warned, poses a risk to employees and the general public.
The report comes as Union Pacific seeks to acquire NS in an $85 billion deal. Wallace said it’s unclear to what extent the train crew shortages are tied to the proposed merger.
In April, the BLET and Teamsters Rail Conference helped establish the Stop the Rail Merger Coalition, a broad cross section of business, labor, and consumers, to oppose the UP-NS merger.
The article (behind a paywall) is available on the Atlanta Journal-Constitution website.
Locomotive photo by David Hawkins