In the year since the East Palestine train derailment, rail safety has been a hot button issue in the United States. After the East Palestine derailment dominated news headlines in late February and March of 2023, there...more
The Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) announced that it has doubled all of its rail safety civil monetary penalty (CMP) base amounts for violations of rail safety and hazardous materials regulations. The changes are...more
The Federal Railroad Administration (FRA), the federal agency that regulates rail safety, introduced a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) on July 28, 2022, that addresses the number of employees required to operate a train,...more
The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, H.R. 3684 (117), was signed into law by President Biden on November 15, 2021. In addition to $66 billion in funding for passenger and freight railroads, the law contains a number...more
Last week FRA issued a notice of grant funding of $318 million for rail infrastructure and safety improvements through the Consolidated Rail Infrastructure and Safety Improvement Grants Program known as CRISI. The deadline...more
Positive Train Control ("PTC") is a system that will automatically apply the train’s brakes in certain situations. PTC systems consist of technologies designed to help detect dangerous situations and automatically intervene...more
There was a plenty of rail-related activity during the 114th Congress and the last two years of the Obama Administration. Amtrak and the Surface Transportation Board (STB) were reauthorized with major changes to Amtrak's...more
Seyfarth Synopsis: The Federal Railroad Administration’s new Safety Advisory seeks to cover activities that fall outside the scope of FRA safety regulations, but within the purview of the OSHA regulations. The Federal...more
An Amtrak train collided with a maintenance vehicle in Chester, Pennsylvania, killing two Amtrak employees, Backhoe operator Joseph Carter Jr., and supervisor Peter Adamovich in the early morning of April 3, 2016. About 30...more
On June 9, 2015, the Federal Railroad Administration ("FRA") issued Safety Advisory 2015-03 requiring passenger railroads to make operational and signal modifications to ensure compliance with speed restrictions. The FRA is...more