Long Freight Trains: Ensuring Safe Operations, Mitigating Adverse Impacts

By: National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and Transportation Research Board and Consensus and Advisory Studies Division and Committee on the Impact of Trains Longer Than 7,500 Feet

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Synopsis: Longer trains have more cars, possibly a greater variety of car types and sizes, and more requirements for power distributed across the train in comparison with shorter manifest trains. Because of this and other factors, the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) should revise the Risk Reduction Program (RRP) rule to require railroads to address all major operational changes in their RRPs in an explicit and comprehensive manner. TRB Special Report 353: Long Freight Trains: Ensuring Safe Operation, Mitigating Adverse Impacts, from the Transportation Research Board of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, examines in response to a request from the U.S. Congress the safety challenges arising from the operation of longer freight trains, and particularly from the increased use of longer manifest trains that transport a mix of freight in many different types of railcars. The report makes several other recommendations to FRA and also examines issues such as the impact of increasing freight train length on the frequency and duration of blocked highway-rail grade crossings and the scheduling and efficient operations of Amtrak intercity passenger trains.