This week's briefing — 12 items selected and edited from over 200 sources across the North American railroad ecosystem. — FMS
■ REGULATORY
Railway Safety Act Finally Gets a Ride — Whether the Train Arrives Is Another Question
The Railway Safety Act, dormant since East Palestine made it politically inevitable and then politically inconvenient, was attached to the BUILD America 250 surface transportation reauthorization bill by the House T&I Committee on May 21. Bipartisan amendment. White House endorsement. Both labor unions claiming victory. The AAR, characteristically, offered measured concern about regulatory burden while stopping short of opposition. Railway Age ran a headline calling it a solution in search of a problem. Here is what the field sees that the Beltway misses: the RSA's operational provisions — enhanced braking requirements for certain hazmat trains, expanded defect detection, crew size codification — are not abstract policy instruments. They are maintenance-of-way budget line items, operating plan constraints, and mechanical department workload multipliers. The question has never been whether these reforms are directionally correct. It is whether Congress has any serious intent to fund the inspection infrastructure and technology mandates embedded in the legislation, or whether this is another unfunded mandate dressed in safety language. Attachment to the reauth bill gives the RSA its best procedural chance since 2023. But the Senate is a different railroad entirely, and conference committee is where good intentions go to get horse-traded into unrecognizable form. The carriers will lobby the margins. Labor will defend the core provisions. The field will wait, as it always does, for whatever emerges — and then figure out how to make it work.
■ LABOR
CPKC Engineers Reject Tentative Agreement by Two-to-One — and the Hourly Wage Model Is the Fault Line
Over 65 percent of voting BLET members on CPKC's former Kansas City Southern territory rejected the tentative agreement, on 71 percent turnout. Those numbers are not ambiguous. They are a repudiation. The central grievance, per the union's statement, centers on the proposed hourly wage structure — a compensation model that CPKC has been trying to normalize across its merged network. For engineers accustomed to mileage-based or trip-rate pay, the hourly model represents something more fundamental than arithmetic. It redefines the relationship between effort, risk, and compensation. An hourly engineer running a heavy unit train through the Meridian Sub gets the same rate as one working a local turn. That flattening is precisely what management wants, and precisely what the craft resists. Where this goes next matters beyond CPKC. The carrier is still integrating the most complex Class I merger in a generation, running trains across two countries under three regulatory regimes. A protracted labor dispute on the legacy KCS property — where crew availability is already tight and the corridor is capacity-constrained — will stress an operating plan that has little slack built into it. The Railway Labor Act's cooling-off machinery will engage if direct bargaining fails. (Translation: this isn't getting resolved quickly.) Watch for whether CPKC comes back with a modified hybrid structure or digs in on the hourly model as a matter of network standardization.
■ REGULATORY
FRA Proposes Rescinding Signal and Dispatcher Certification Rules It Finalized Two Years Ago
Two years. That is how long FRA's certification rules for signal employees and dispatchers survived before the agency proposed rescinding them. The May 2024 final rules were supposed to bring these crafts into the same certification framework that has governed locomotive engineers and conductors for decades. Now, after reviewing petitions for reconsideration, FRA is walking both of them back. The field should not be surprised. The original rules imposed compliance burdens on short lines and regional carriers that many simply could not absorb — not because they lacked commitment to qualified employees, but because the certification infrastructure assumed a Class I administrative apparatus. A 200-mile short line with four signal maintainers and two dispatchers does not have a training department, a certification board, or the back-office capacity to manage the paperwork load those rules demanded. What gets lost in the regulatory ping-pong is the legitimate underlying question: should the industry have formal, federally administered qualification standards for the people who control train movements and maintain the signal systems those movements depend on? The answer should be yes. But the mechanism has to be scaled to the industry as it actually exists, not as FRA imagines it from its offices on New Jersey Avenue. These rescissions create a vacuum. How it gets filled — by industry-led standards, by a redesigned FRA rule, or by nothing at all — will define signal and dispatch workforce accountability for the next decade.
■ CAPITAL
UP-NS Merger Application Revised and Refiled — the Biggest Story Nobody Is Covering Properly
Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern submitted a revised major merger application to the Surface Transportation Board. Comments on completeness were due May 8. And somehow, most of the trade press treated this as a calendar item. Let's be clear about what is on the table. This is a proposed combination of the two largest railroads in the eastern and western halves of the United States. If approved, it would create a transcontinental carrier of a scale not seen since the pre-breakup Penn Central era — except this one would actually be solvent. The STB's post-2001 merger rules were designed to make exactly this kind of consolidation nearly impossible, requiring applicants to demonstrate that the transaction enhances competition rather than merely surviving antitrust review. What does the revised application change? We do not yet have the full document, but a revision at this stage typically means the applicants restructured their competitive access provisions — the conditions under which other carriers, short lines, and shippers retain routing options on the merged network. That is where every prior mega-merger has either succeeded or collapsed. For short lines, the downstream effects are existential. Switching agreements, per-diem arrangements, interline settlements, car supply — all of it gets renegotiated in a post-merger world. This proceeding will take years. It will reshape the industry. Start paying attention now.
■ LABOR
LIRR Strike Ends After Three Days — but the Ratification Vote Is Where It Could Come Apart Again
Five unions, including BLET, reached a tentative agreement with the Long Island Rail Road after a three-day strike that began May 16. Roughly 500 locomotive engineers and several hundred other craft employees walked off a property that moves 300,000 riders on a normal weekday. The strike ended. The commuters returned. The political class exhaled. But the tentative agreement now goes to membership for ratification, and if CPKC's engineers just taught us anything, it is that tentative does not mean done. The LIRR is a unique beast — a commuter railroad operating under the Railway Labor Act rather than state public-employee labor law, which means the federal mediation and cooling-off machinery governs. That same machinery failed to prevent the walkout, which tells you how far apart the parties were. What the broader industry should note is the pattern: labor is rejecting agreements at a rate we haven't seen in decades. CPKC engineers. LIRR coalition. The common thread is not wages alone — it is the accumulated friction of years of workforce reduction, schedule compression, and quality-of-life erosion that makes any deal feel insufficient. Management across the industry would do well to recognize that the rejection rate is a signal, not an anomaly.
■ SAFETY
Norfolk Southern Derailment in Georgia Puts Grade Crossing Geometry Back on the Table
A Norfolk Southern double-stack intermodal train derailed in Alto, Georgia, after striking a low-boy tractor-trailer stuck on a grade crossing. No injuries. The Hall County Sheriff confirmed the 11:30 a.m. incident. Here is what the incident report will likely show and the headline will not: a low-boy trailer gets stuck on a grade crossing because the crossing profile cannot accommodate the trailer's ground clearance. This is not a driver error problem. It is a geometry problem. The Federal Highway Administration maintains a list of hazardous grade crossings, and the criteria for identifying profile-deficient crossings have not been meaningfully updated since the 1990s. Meanwhile, intermodal and oversize-load truck traffic has grown steadily, and the vehicles getting stuck are getting longer and lower. Every Class I has a crossing that the locals know will hang up a low-clearance trailer. The railroad reports the near-misses. The state DOT studies the profile. The improvement project enters a queue behind forty other projects competing for Section 130 funding. And eventually, a train hits something. The Alto crossing may or may not have been on anyone's watch list. But the pattern is systemic. Grade crossing profile improvements are among the highest-return, lowest-cost safety investments available, and they remain chronically underfunded because no single agency owns the problem. The railroad owns the track. The state owns the road. The truck driver owns the consequences.
■ LABOR
Two Short Lines Petition for One-Person Crews — and the Real Fight Is Over What Constitutes a Precedent
SMART-TD flagged two short line carriers petitioning FRA for exemptions from the two-person crew size rule, which has been federal law for barely two years. The union called it alarming. The carriers would call it practical. The field calls it inevitable. The crew size rule, as written, includes a waiver process. That process exists because Congress and FRA recognized that a blanket mandate across every railroad in America — from BNSF's triple-track transcon to a fifty-car-a-day grain shuttle — would produce absurdities. Short lines with low-speed, low-density operations and no intermediate switching have a legitimate operational case for single-person crews under specific conditions. The danger is not in the individual petitions. It is in what happens if the waivers are granted without rigorous operational safeguards — remote monitoring, enhanced communication protocols, territory restrictions — because then the precedent becomes available to carriers with very different risk profiles. SMART-TD's concern is strategic, not hysterical. Every Class I is watching these petitions. If two small railroads can demonstrate safe single-person operations, the argument for broader exemptions becomes exponentially harder to resist. The waiver process is the pressure valve. Whether it holds depends entirely on how FRA administers it.
■ GENERAL
BNSF Names New COO — and the Appointment Signals an Operations-First Posture
Craig Morehouse is BNSF's new executive vice president and chief operations officer. Leadership changes at the nation's largest railroad by revenue ton-miles are never just personnel announcements. They are operating philosophy telegraphed through an org chart. Morehouse's elevation matters because of what BNSF is navigating right now: a Southern Transcon that remains the most capacity-constrained freight corridor in North America, an intermodal network under competitive pressure from truck pricing that finally stabilized, and a grain franchise heading into what USDA projects will be a strong export year. The COO at BNSF does not set strategy in an abstract sense. The COO decides how many trains run, where the capital goes on the ground, how the terminal dwell targets get set, and how the railroad balances precision-scheduled operations against the network fluidity problems that PSR has historically created. Who sits in that chair determines whether a shipper's car gets pulled Tuesday or Thursday. For short lines connecting to BNSF — and there are hundreds of them — the new COO's priorities on interchange performance, car cycle times, and local service commitments will be felt within months. The question that matters: does Morehouse come from the operating side or the financial side of the house? That distinction tells you more about BNSF's next three years than any investor presentation will.
■ MARKET
Rail Dwell Rising at LA-Long Beach While Truck Holds Steady — Read the Port Metrics Backward
April container dwell data from the LA-Long Beach port complex shows rail dwell times increasing while truck dwell remained broadly stable. Most logistics analysts will frame this as a rail efficiency problem. They are reading it backward. Rising rail dwell at the ports typically signals one of three things: inland terminal congestion limiting the rate at which trains can be received, chassis or container imbalances that slow the loading process at on-dock or near-dock facilities, or — and this is the one that matters most heading into peak shipping season — an uptick in volume that the rail network hasn't yet absorbed into its operating plan. BNSF and Union Pacific split the LA-Long Beach intermodal franchise. Both carriers have invested heavily in on-dock rail capacity over the past five years, but the constraint is rarely at the port itself. It is at the inland ramps — Chicago, Memphis, Dallas — where inbound trains compete for unloading slots with domestic intermodal traffic. If rail dwell continues to creep upward through May and June, watch for carriers to impose temporary surcharges or restrict bookings on certain lanes. The shipper who planned for forty-eight-hour port-to-rail transition and is getting seventy-two has already lost the cost advantage that made intermodal competitive with over-the-road on that corridor.
■ MARKET
Roadcheck Week and a Supreme Court Ruling Squeeze Truck Capacity — Rail Should Be Paying Attention
CVSA's annual International Roadcheck inspection blitz, combined with an unspecified Supreme Court ruling affecting motor carrier insurance requirements, is tightening available truck capacity heading into summer. EASE Logistics projects sustained pressure through 2026. When trucks come off the road — whether through enforcement, insurance costs, or driver shortages — freight doesn't disappear. It looks for alternatives. And the first alternative, for any load that can tolerate a twenty-four to forty-eight hour transit penalty, is intermodal rail. This is the market dynamic that Class I intermodal marketing departments have been waiting for since truck spot rates cratered in late 2024. Tighter truck capacity means higher truck rates, which means the intermodal price spread widens in rail's favor. But here's the operational catch: rail intermodal capacity is not infinitely elastic. Chassis pools are finite. Terminal gates have throughput limits. And the railroads spent the last four years reducing headcount and rationalizing terminal networks under PSR-driven efficiency mandates. If truck capacity tightens materially and intermodal demand surges, the carriers that maintained terminal flexibility will capture the volume. The ones that optimized for cost at the expense of surge capacity will watch it drive past on the interstate. The freight doesn't wait.
■ REGULATORY
STB Data Modernization Sounds Bureaucratic — Until You Realize What It Means for Service Accountability
The Surface Transportation Board announced a data modernization initiative: streamlined collections, a beta data portal, elimination of redundant reporting requirements. On its face, this is the kind of administrative housekeeping that merits exactly zero attention from anyone who moves trains for a living. Look closer. The STB's ability to regulate railroad service — to intervene when a carrier's performance deteriorates to the point where shippers have no viable alternative — depends entirely on the quality and timeliness of the data it collects. For years, the Board has relied on self-reported carrier data submitted in formats that resist automated analysis. The Weekly Performance Reports introduced during the 2021-2022 service crisis were a step forward, but they remained carrier-curated narratives layered over selectively presented metrics. A functional data portal with automated collection changes the dynamic. It means the Board can identify service deterioration in near-real-time rather than waiting for a shipper to file a formal complaint. It means short line operators can see interchange performance data without relying on the Class I's version of events. It means the public — and Congress — can access the same metrics the Board uses to evaluate whether the network is functioning. Data infrastructure is not glamorous. But it is the foundation on which every regulatory action rests. The STB just upgraded the foundation.
■ GENERAL
The Railway Labor Act Turns 100 — and Its Limitations Have Never Been More Visible
The Railway Labor Act was signed by President Coolidge on May 20, 1926, by a combined Congressional vote of 531 to 26. It was the first federal statute guaranteeing workers the right to organize. A century later, it remains the governing framework for railroad and airline labor relations, and its age shows. The RLA was designed for an era when the railroad was the economy — when a nationwide rail strike could starve cities and halt commerce within days. Its elaborate mediation, cooling-off, and Presidential Emergency Board procedures were built to prevent that catastrophe. They work, in the narrow sense that they prevent strikes. But they work by making the process so protracted that both sides exhaust themselves before reaching the picket line. The LIRR strike this month — three days before a tentative deal — is the exception that proves the rule. What the RLA does not do, and was never designed to do, is produce timely, equitable outcomes. The 2022 national freight rail dispute dragged on for over two years before Congress imposed a settlement. CPKC's engineers just rejected a deal that took months to negotiate. The statutory machinery will now grind through another cycle. For the workers in the cab, the RLA's centennial is less a celebration than a reminder. The law protects the process. Whether it protects the people in it is a different question entirely.