Ohio's Toxic Train Disaster Follows ‘Perfect Storm’ Of Cuts, Deregulation

In 2007, railroad giant Norfolk Southern Corp. boasted it was making “railroad history” by operating the nation’s first freight train equipped with electronically controlled pneumatic brakes — a modern technology that the company noted could make trains safer by significantly decreasing how long it took them to stop.

Norfolk Southern said at the time that it planned to add ECP brakes — which the company said had “the potential to reduce train stopping distances by as much as 60 percent over conventional air brake systems” — to dozens of locomotives and cars in its coal train fleet.

Fast forward to 2014, when the Obama administration unveiled new safety rules that, among other things, required ECP brakes on trains hauling a certain amount of crude oil and other so-called “high-hazard flammable” materials. The Association of American Railroads, an industry lobbying group of which Norfolk Southern is a member, fiercely opposed the regulations.

“ECP brakes would be extremely costly without providing an offsetting benefit,” the trade group wrote in public comments on the rule. It argued the push to mandate the technology lacked a safety justification.