Railroad employee, working solo, got warnings but says he was too busy to notice before derailment; safety bill stalls

Aerial view of the deliberate burning of hazardous vinyl chloride
(Columbiana County commissioners photo from NTSB via ABC)

One employee watching 19,500 miles of track could have prevented Norfolk Southern Corp.'s February train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, but he says he was distracted by other trains and failed to see  warnings that a wheel bearing was heating up and would fail, reports Darrel Rowland of ABC News: "He wasn't even looking at the readings from defect detectors along the tracks on the bearing, suspected by the National Transportation Safety Board of causing the fiery crash in East Palestine."

Gary Rambo, automatic train-control analyst for the Atlanta-based railroad, told NTSB investigators "he was monitoring other Norfolk Southern trains at the same time," Rowland reports. "Thus, he didn't notice a 'trending alert' from the wayside defect detector showing a spike of 103 degrees in the bearing of doomed train 32N in Ohio. . . . He said, 'Honestly, I didn't see it when it first came in. There were three other trains I was working on.'"

"Rambo said he didn't know for sure the train had derailed until he heard from the chief dispatcher's office that 'We got a lot of cars on the ground' and 'They're on fire,'" Rowland reports. "He told investigators that on the day of the crash, he – as usual – was working solo on a 12-hour shift, attempting to monitor from home all the company's trains on 19,500 miles of track in the eastern U.S. . . . He said he did not even have a scheduled lunch break or time to use the bathroom as he tried to keep up with an average of 300 alerts per shift. . . . Rambo said two persons used to work the shift until Norfolk Southern staff cutbacks a few years ago."

Should Rambo had noticed the warning, he may not have acted, Rowland writes: "The temperature fell just short of the railroad's threshold to stop the train – although whether someone like Rambo could have asked for a halt due to the rapid temperature rise remains unclear. . . . Critics say the nothing-to-see-here stance of Norfolk Southern on a crucial element of the derailment provides just one indicator of how hard it's proving to bring real change on rail safety as we approach the six-month anniversary of the crash where 38 cars from the 1.75-mile-long train derailed in East Palestine, including 11 with toxic materials that first responders had difficulty identifying."

Ohio Sens. Sherrod Brown (D) and J.D. Vance are pushing a bill to create more rail safeguards. The Senate Commerce Committee approved it in May, and a handful of other "Trump-aligned conservatives have signed onto the effort, but party leaders on both sides believe the legislation in its current form lacks enough GOP support to clear the 60-vote threshold" in the Senate, Punchbowl News reports. "The problem for most Republicans is that the bill goes too far in imposing new regulations on the industry.”

Joe Perticone of The Bulwark’s “Press Pass” reports, “The bill’s fortunes started shifting around the same time that the Norfolk Southern Corp.” political-action committee “was cutting big checks to PACs and members of Congress whose positions made them critical to the bill’s fate.“