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...