PRINCETON — Three weeks ago, on the heels of the derailment of one of its freight trains in Virginia, CSX announced a heightened emphasis on safety.
The railroad hired Dekra, a firm specializing in telling transportation companies how they can make their operations safer, to deliver a report by the fall outlining ways CSX can improve.
That report was being built at the same time a 98-car CSX train derailed in southern Indiana, causing a propane and petroleum fire that burned into the night and forced the evacuation of several homes.
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CSX is coming under scrutiny for prioritizing efficiency over safety as it completes a rethinking of how it operates its trains. That process, called precision scheduled railroading, led to the shedding of thousands of jobs, and a heightened emphasis on getting fewer — but significantly longer — trains on the rails.
Some employees at CSX say the company's obsessive focus with getting trains out on time has put a strain on everyone from those operating the trains to front-line managers at the company's rail yards.
Among their claims:
- Yardmasters pressure employees to skip mandatory brake checks in an effort to get trains out on time.
- Managers sign off on work and inspections that never happened out of fear delays could jeopardize their jobs.
- A culture of blame exists where the lowest person on the totem pole takes the fall when things go wrong. One carman said he was reprimanded after a train he inspected pulled apart nearly 2,000 miles — and multiple crew changes — after he last inspected it.
CSX would not comment on those accusations.
CSX's competitors — Union Pacific, BNSF and Norfolk Southern — generally saw their accident rates fall between 2015 and 2017. But CSX's accident rates remained steady, according to Federal Railroad Administration data.
And while competing railroads have seen steady improvements in their accident rates since 2017, CSX's accident rate has increased steadily through the first half of this year, according to FRA data. That includes the fatal collision of an Amtrak and CSX train in South Carolina earlier this year.
"That accident was very much of a 'safety culture' thing," said Steven Ditmeyer, a former director at the Federal Railroad Administration. "There were multiple failures there. I view that as very much related to a deteriorated safety culture."
But CSX spokeswoman Laura Phelps said safety is paramount.
"There is no higher priority than safety at CSX. Nothing is placed above it," she said. "Our goal is to be the safest railroad."
In addition to hiring Dekra, CSX recruited a new chief safety officer, James Schwichtenberg, to lead its safety focus. The railroad also said it was spending more this year on track maintenance than it spent last year.
Federal Railroad Administration spokesman Warren Flatau said the agency is still investigating Sunday's derailment in Princeton.