It’s No Way to Run a Railroad : If federal inspectors don’t put the public’s safety first, who will?

Government regulation of the nation’s railroads wandered off the track recently, raising hard questions about its vigilance in matters of public health and safety.

A scheduled June inspection of Southern Pacific Co. locomotives was canceled despite the company’s shoddy record of compliance, because SP complained that keeping its trains idle for tests was costing it money.

H.T. (Tom) Paton, regional director of the Federal Railroad Adminstration, trying to explain the cancelled visit by his people in Colton, said that his mission was to find the best way to deal with a railroad, not to bankrupt it.

It’s hard to quarrel with that. But Paton’s inspectors earlier that month found defects--many of them serious--in 36 of 45 SP locomotives in Bakersfield, 79 of 92 in Tucson and 43 of 50 in Sparks, Nev.

There is no indication that the canceled inspection had anything to do with a devastating derailment in Dunsmuir, Calif., that dumped a tank car of herbicide into the Sacramento River and destroyed wildlife and habitat over a 50-mile stretch. Nor is there any evidence of a link between the skipped inspection and the SP derailment at Seacliff that closed down the Ventura Freeway for days.

But the general record of compliance by any transportation company with maintenance rules is important--as important as a lucky strike by inspectors in spotting a flaw that could cause trouble a few miles down the track.

Cancelling inspections makes the general record of compliance all the harder to establish.

In that sense, neither the FRA nor the Federal Aviation Administration, nor any other regulatory agency, does a carrier--and certainly not the public that it carries--any favors by lightening up on a company just because checking its equipment means it cannot haul cargo or transport people on a given day.

In fact, Southern Pacific needs to know what shape its locomotives are in even more than the railroad inspectors do. The company, not the government, is responsible for keeping its equipment in good condition, and if there is some breakdown in the repair system, it needs to know that.

If a railroad is in such bad financial shape that it can’t maintain its equipment in safe condition, it probably has no business being in business.

For airlines and the millions of passengers who ride planes every year, this may seem nothing more than elaborating on the obvious. But it applies equally to freight trains, particularly trains that carry dangerous and often potentially deadly chemicals through wilderness areas and the hearts of cities every day.