National Transportation Safety Board Chair Jennifer Homendy kicked off the BLET convention Tuesday morning by urging members of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen to demand meaningful changes to improve railroad safety, citing the deaths and injuries of thousands of rail workers and the preventable tragedies investigated by the agency.
“The fact is, rail workers are dying,” Homendy said. “Since 2020, 54 rail workers have lost their lives on the job. Nearly 19,000 others were injured.” The NTSB Chair emphasized that “these aren’t just numbers. Behind every statistic is a person: a parent, a spouse, a brother, a sister, a child, a friend,” she said.
Homendy leads the NTSB, the independent federal agency responsible for investigating transportation accidents, determining their causes and issuing safety recommendations to prevent future tragedies. The agency investigates accidents across multiple transportation modes, including rail, aviation, highway, marine and pipeline transportation.
Among the rail workers killed in preventable tragedies she noted were BLET members Chris Seeling, of Division 85 in Columbia, South Carolina, and Lou Shuster, of Division 607 in Cleveland, Ohio.
Seeling died in the 2005 Graniteville, South Carolina, train collision that released chlorine gas and killed nine people. Homendy told delegates that Positive Train Control (PTC) technology could have prevented the collision. PTC is designed to prevent certain train accidents, including collisions and derailments.
She said the NTSB had been recommending the adoption of PTC for decades when Seeling died. During that period, the agency investigated 154 rail accidents that killed more than 300 people and injured more than 6,800 others, many seriously, she said. Expressing frustration, she reported that the NTSB had first recommended the use of PTC in 1969. She pointed out that the United States sent a man to the moon in 1969 but railroad foot-dragging “took a full five decades to make Positive Train Control a reality.” She said congressional action ultimately was necessary.
Despite that progress, Homendy said additional safety improvements are long overdue. She pointed to the need to ensure locomotive engineers and conductors have access to emergency escape breathing apparatus aboard trains. The industry has failed to act on that and more than 400 other NTSB safety recommendations, she told delegates.
Homendy challenged BLET members and other industry leaders to turn the lessons of past accidents into concrete action.
“Leaders are called to act. Act to prevent future tragedy. Act to ensure no other family experiences such tremendous loss and heartbreak,” she said. “Act to ensure the tragedies we investigate today become the lives we save tomorrow.”
She emphasized that tributes to workers killed on the job must be accompanied by measurable improvements throughout the railroad industry, from train cabs and rail yards to training facilities, dispatch centers, bargaining tables and government offices.
“The only worthy tribute is change. Real change. Measurable change,” Homendy said.
However, not all change is good. Homendy had strong words of warning about the rush by the railroads to automate and in doing so devalue the critical role humans play in the safe operation of trains. “You don’t get to build, operate, and maintain a system that demands perfection, strip away its safeguards, training, track inspections, and then act surprised when a human being turns out to be human. And then, you turn around and say the answer is to get rid of the human? No f—ing way! You are not replaceable. The problem isn’t the human. The problem isn’t a broken rule. It’s a culture. That puts profit over people. And treats safety as an expense. Workers as expendable.”
She closed by invoking a longstanding labor movement rallying cry, connecting the NTSB’s safety mission with the BLET’s responsibility to protect its members. “We have a saying in the labor movement, one I often return to: ‘Mourn the dead and fight like hell for the living,’” she said. “We owe it to every BLET member who deserves to return home safely to their loved ones: To mourn the dead and fight like hell for the living.”
