Ohio train derailment: Federal regulators urges railroads to examine track detectors

The Ohio derailment forced half the town of about 5,000 people to evacuate for days as toxic chemicals burned, leaving residents with lingering health concerns.

Freight railroads should reexamine the way they use and maintain the detectors along the tracks that are supposed to spot overheating bearings, federal regulators urged Tuesday in the wake of a fiery Ohio derailment and other recent crashes.

The safety advisory from the Federal Railroad Administration stopped short of telling the railroads exactly what to do. Instead, it encouraged them to make sure the detectors are getting inspected often enough by trained employees and that the railroads have safe standards for determining when to stop a train or park a railcar when a warning is triggered.

The National Transportation Safety Board has said the crew operating the Norfolk Southern train that derailed outside East Palestine, Ohio, near the Pennsylvania border on Feb. 3 got a warning from such a detector but couldn’t stop the train before more than three dozen cars came off the tracks and caught fire. The Federal Railroad Administration said overheating bearings likely caused at least four other derailments since 2021.

The Ohio derailment forced half the town of about 5,000 people to evacuate for days as toxic chemicals burned, leaving residents with lingering health concerns. Government tests haven’t found dangerous levels of chemicals in the air or water in the area. The EPA opened an office in the town Tuesday to help address residents’ questions.

“For trains containing hazardous materials, the potential consequence of a derailment is catastrophic, and allowing a train transporting a hazardous material to continue to operate, without restriction, after an HBD (hot bearing detector) alert is likely not appropriate,” the FRA advisory said.

Norfolk Southern officials didn’t immediately respond to the advisory. After the NTSB issued its preliminary findings last week, the railroad said the derailment had prompted it to inspect all of the nearly 1,000 trackside heat detectors on its network. That was on top of regular inspections it normally does on those sensors every 30 days, Norfolk Southern said.

Dave Clarke, the former director of the Center for Transportation Research at the University of Tennessee, said the safety advisory was not surprising.

“This is just FRA proposing the obvious, in my opinion. I doubt if any Class I (major freight railroad) was waiting for this,” he said.