Why it Matters

Congress faces mounting pressure to strengthen freight rail safety after a series of troubling trends threaten decades of improvement. According to a new Congressional Research Service report published July 24 examining freight rail safety legislation and regulatory issues, Congress must grapple with a series of railroad safety failures. The report says trespassing deaths have nearly doubled on a per-train-mile basis since 2015, grade crossing incident rates have risen, and railroad fatalities hit their second-highest level in at least 20 years in 2024.

The Big Picture

The FAST Act of 2015 mandated a phaseout of older, less crashworthy tank cars used to transport flammable liquids. The CRS report shows that roughly half of tank cars used to carry flammable liquids other than crude oil and ethanol do not conform to enhanced standards.

Current federal regulations do not require the use of wayside defect detectors or specify temperature thresholds for inspection. Legislative proposals would require wayside defect detectors every 10 to 20 miles on key routes, compared to the industry's voluntary standard of every 40 miles on key routes.

Average Class I railroad train length increased more than 13 percent from 2016 to 2025, rising from 71.9 to 83.3 cars. A September 2024 National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine study found evidence of a positive correlation between manifest train length and derailment risk from train makeup and handling issues.

No federal law or regulation specifically bans or penalizes trains that block highway-rail crossings. State and local ordinances establishing time limits for blocked crossings have been repeatedly found preempted by federal law. The U.S. Solicitor General in November 2023 recommended against Supreme Court review of a case involving Ohio's blocked crossing laws, and the Supreme Court denied Ohio's petition in January 2024.

Background

The Federal Railroad Association (FRA) issued a final rule in April 2024 requiring a minimum two-person crew on most trains, reversing course after withdrawing a similar proposal in 2019 when it stated that available data "do not establish that one-person operations are less safe than multi-person train crews."

The FRA employed roughly 370 safety inspectors in fiscal year 2026, up from 350 in fiscal year 2023, but down from 390 in fiscal years 2018–2020.

No freight rail safety bills were enacted in the 118th Congress, despite several proposals. H.R. 971, the Reducing Accidents In Locomotives (RAIL) Act of 2025, was introduced in the 119th Congress. Several freight rail safety provisions, including some substantially similar to those in H.R. 928, H.R. 971, and H.R. 2515, were included in H.R. 8870.

The Bottom Line

The data in the CRS report suggest voluntary approaches have been less than successful. In 2024, there were 963 fatalities on America's railroads, the second-highest in at least 20 years, and 6,535 injuries. While the number of injuries was the third-lowest in 20 years, trespassing deaths and grade crossing incidents are rising. No hazmat-by-rail spill has resulted in a fatality in over a decade, although hazmat-by-rail releases tend to result in more damage per incident, as measured in dollars, than highway or pipeline spills.

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