Commentary

When you get a good deal, take it

Arbitrator Robert O. Harris told the United Transportation Union (UTU) and railroads in 1991, then unable to agree at the bargaining table, “Welcome to the oldest established craps game in Washington. Like the suckers in ‘Guys and Dolls,’ you are risking your futures on the roll of the dice [when you fail to make a voluntary agreement].”
Commentary

BNSF, SMART seek historic crew consist revision

A gutsy, proactive, and far-sighted collaboration between BNSF and a general committee of its largest labor union has produced a tentative agreement to allow freight trains equipped with Positive Train Control (PTC) to operate as early as next year with a lone engineer in the cab and no conventional on-board conductor between specific territories in the Midwest and Pacific Northwest.
Commentary

STB’s newest: Status quo beware

Moving homogeneous electrons through wires, or freight in trucks over publicly financed highways, is hardly akin to moving cargo over privately owned and maintained railroads.

Commentary

Dear Senators McCaskill & Blunt: Fuggetaboutit!

With regard to Missouri’s two U.S. senators, Democrat Claire McCaskill and Republican Roy Blunt, we invoke urban slang from cranky New Yorkers, and their brethren across the Hudson in New Jersey, to suggest that they “fuggetaboutit.”
Commentary

Data-phobic FRA’s “Book of Mormon”

Rail labor’s sabots are showing. It’s not a pleasant sight. “Sabots”—French for wooden shoes and the etymological root of “sabotage”—were thrown into the gears of textile looms by 15th century workers in failed hopes of thwarting technology.

Commentary

Union boss may have LIRR in checkmate

This is about the Long Island Rail Road. It’s about a dispute over wages and benefits. It’s about politics that have a stereotypically anti-labor House Republican majority poised to line up on rail labor’s side to embarrass a Democratic governor. And it’s about a union boss named Anthony Simon, who should be teaching strategy to future battle commanders at the Army War College.
Commentary

Data drought haunts FRA crew-size mandate

By the Federal Railroad Administration’s own congressional testimony, the years 2012 and 2013 were among the railroads’ safest on record, while the relatively few train crashes were mostly the result of human error and track defects.
Commentary

Shipper hypocrisy mocks regulatory history

A recurring and intractable thread tying together railroad history is that when the choice has been between economic liberty and government intrusion, selecting the latter has repetitively discouraged capital investment, diminished service quality, adversely affected safety, and sooner than later caused hand-wringing among those most dependent on rail transportation.

Commentary

Highway homicide affects railroads, too

This is about a highway homicide — and we know who dunnit. The perp long ago was identified by state and federal authorities. Yet Congress refuses to order the collar, closing its eyes to a mayhem playing out at every hour, on every federal-aid roadway and adversely affecting every taxpayer and every motorist in the wallet, while simultaneously turning on its head the concept of economic efficiency.

Commentary

Mexico to its rail franchisees: “Yanqui go home”

At the turn of the 20th century, seven-term Mexican President Porfirio Diaz is cited as having complained, “Poor Mexico, so far from God and so close to the United States.”