Conrail Freight Faulted for ‘Significant’ Safety Lapses

An 800-page federal assessment released today said the sprawling Conrail freight railroad has “significant safety problems.”

The problems, concluded the report of the Federal Railroad Administration, stem largely from an alleged failure of railroad management to provide enough guidance on safety matters to employees.

The FRA “found what appears to be a systemic fault within Conrail: too many middle- and upper-middle managers value ‘production’ over ‘safety,’ and fail to translate the organizational safety commitment into effective safety programs,” the agency said.

The agency said it conducted the assessment because of a string of small accidents, and because agency inspectors “suspected that, while statistics had yet to reflect it, Conrail’s performance was beginning to deteriorate.”

In addition, the FRA said the 12-year-old railroad has never been subject to such an assessment while owned by the federal government.

Operates in 14 States

The railroad, officially the Consolidated Rail Corp., operates in 14 states in the Midwest and East. It was created by the federal government in 1976 from the bankrupt shells of a handful of failing railroads.

On Jan. 4, 1987, 16 people were killed when a Conrail train collided with an Amtrak train near Chase, Md. Investigators said the Conrail train slid through signals warning it to slow down or stop. The National Transportation Safety Board said Conrail engineer Ricky Gates had been impaired by marijuana use.

Today’s FRA report said Conrail was “unreasonably slow” in implementing drug and alcohol testing based on whether there was reasonable cause to suspect a problem.

“The railroad’s program did not start until May of 1987, 15 months after it had authority to begin and four months after the Chase, Md., tragedy,” the report said.