This Feb., Norfolk Southern’s train derailment catastrophe in East Palestine, Ohio dragged the decrepit state of the US rail system into the national spotlight. A rash of other railroad catastrophes in recent weeks has only piled on questions about why and how the railroads have become so dangerous. With over 1,000 train derailments per year, the rate and net occurrence of rail disasters in the US far exceeds that of other wealthy countries. While the attention of the mainstream media and general public may be new, the issue of rail accidents and safety has been slowly simmering for years—and railroad workers’ unions have long been at the forefront of the struggle to fix this problem. TRNN Associate Editor Mel Buer speaks with Michael Paul Lindsay, a locomotive engineer, Railroad Workers United organizer, and 17-year employee of Union Pacific about the state of US railroads, the link between train derailments and rail carriers’ profit-seeking behavior, and what unions are trying to do about it.
Transcript
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Mel Buer:
Welcome back, everyone, to The Real News Network Podcast. My name is Mel Buer, and I am an associate editor with The Real News. It is so great to have you all with us today. The Real News is an independent viewer supported nonprofit media network. We don’t take corporate cash. We don’t have ads. And we don’t put our reporting behind paywalls, which means we need each one of you to become monthly supporters of our work so we can keep bringing y’all coverage of the voices and issues that you care about most. Head on over to therealnews.com/support and donate today. It really does make a difference.
As many long time supporters of The Real News knows, we’ve been covering the ongoing struggle on the railroads for over a year. Last year, The Real News editor-in-chief, Max Alvarez, and I spoke with dozens of workers from all over the country about the problems plaguing the rail industry, from Draconian attendance policies that destroy the lives and bodies of its overburdened workforce, to stagnant wages for its workers across all crafts, to the ways in which a hands off approach by regulators has led to many of these cost-cutting, profit maximizing measures to go unchecked or under-investigated, even as derailments happen almost daily, including catastrophic and damaging ones like the Norfolk Southern derailment in East Palestine, Ohio six weeks ago.
In the last month, a number of large derailments have made headlines, including a runaway train derailment in Southern California, the derailment of an ethanol carrying train in Minnesota, and most recently, one in Montana that saw dozens of cars leave the track. These derailments continue to have disastrous effects on communities across the country, leaving working people to pick up the pieces. While the prevailing narrative from the federal government and the rail carries is that derailments are commonplace with over 1000 derailments occurring each year, the question remains. Why do these derailments occur with such frequency? And what have the rail unions been doing to try and solve these problems within their industry? With me today to discuss all of this is Paul Lindsey, a locomotive engineer and a 17 year employee of Union Pacific in Pocatello, Idaho. Paul is an organizer with Railroad Workers United, who like many union railroaders has been blowing the whistle on the worsening conditions on the railroads for years now. Welcome, Paul. Please take a moment to introduce yourself to those of our listeners who may not know you and the kind of organizing work that you do.
Paul Lindsey:
Hello. Good to be on your who. My name’s Michael Paul Lindsey, and I’ve been with the railroad a long time, but over the last few years especially, since the railroads have started implementing a program that has been discussed here before on The Real News Network, precision scheduled railroading, essentially the drive to cut cost in the industry, to cut cost at all expense, even the expense of the customers, the shippers that rely on vital rail service. It’s been a blind push to cut resources, cut maintenance, cut staffing, locomotives, track maintenance, essentially with the end result of being able to buy back more shares to increase dividends and to increase bonuses for executives and shareholders and management that they entice to drive up their numbers, drive up their average train length, increase their numbers for their terminals. And basically, it’s putting the entire railroad on different teams that are all fighting against each other, which I really have to ask. So if you guys all want to be on different teams competing with each other, then why did you merge into giant monopolies to begin with?
Mel Buer:
That’s a valid question, absolutely.
Paul Lindsey:
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And so as far as what I’ve been doing, I have a TikTok channel calling out corruption that I’ve been trying to make videos when I can, but I also produce content. My latest content that I produced was for the Nevada state legislature for train length legislation and also some content on what happened at SEMA. I also write, publish in Railway Age. I try to just bring these issues to the table truly as someone that has experienced it and also someone that’s passionate for the industry and wants to see it grow and succeed. This is not just about my own personal interests. I want to see the industry grow and modernize and succeed, and actually enter the 21st century like the rest of the rail industry across the world has done.
Mel Buer:
Very cool. I’ve seen some of the work that you’ve put together. It’s great. I get that newsletter every week whenever it comes out. So let’s crack into the chat about derailments and get started on this conversation. Derailments can happen for a number of reasons, broken wheel bearings like in East Palestine, or damaged track, collisions at crossings, all these things can contribute to train derailments. One of the most recent derailments was in Southern California and it involved a runaway train. Can you kind of tell me what happened? Just give us an overview of how this took place because you see some of these pictures online, and the damage looked intense, like a bomb had gone off at the bottom of this mountain. So please give us some information about that.
Paul Lindsey:
Well, absolutely. So it was like a bomb went off. That was a loaded iron ore train, and iron ore is one of the heaviest commodities that we haul at the railroad. And there’s been a little bit of misunderstanding with news media reporting as to the information that’s being spread out there. So for one, it’s being reported that the train had 55 cars, and that there was no crew on it, so it almost seems like the railroads themselves, that Union Pacific is trying to direct the narrative that this was somehow a big, giant accident, that it was a train that just happened to get away, and it wasn’t even that long of a train. It was 55 cars. That’s not true at all.
So this was a double length 154 car loaded iron ore train. It was 22,000 tons when it left its point of origin in Utah. And this train’s had well documented problems. It’s been documented to the FRA as well as Union Pacific’s own internal safety hotline reporting system, which really isn’t … It’s not a hotline. It’s more like you go on there and you go on the website and report potential safety issues. But really, it’s an internal thing. It’s something that local Union Pacific management deals with and they don’t really have any incentive to get it out to where it’s actually part of the national statistics for the FRA or anything. They try to solve it in house.
If you were to compare our industry to say the aviation industry, where they have this anonymous system where you can anonymously report safety issues to the FAA at any time, we don’t have that in the rail industry. So a lot of it’s handled in house because we seem to believe that railroads have the capability of self-regulating in this country, but they’re monopolies. They’re unchallenged, dominant monopolies, especially in states like Nevada, where this train was running from into California. Union Pacific has essentially an unchallenged monopoly in the state of Nevada. So what happened here is this train was double length because Union Pacific, as part of their precision schedule railroading, they’re trying to reduce crew [inaudible 00:08:01]. They’re trying to make the trains longer because they’re seeing it as, well, this is fixed cost that can be reduced by reducing the number of crews on these trains. But it doesn’t take into consideration all of the other damaging effects that it has across the system, so for example, delays around terminals, or the fact, the undisputed fact that longer trains have more frequent mechanical problems.
And these mechanical problems can be minor or they can be major, resulting in derailment. Minor would be something like this train is blocking the entire railroad and trains going both directions cannot move through the area, and it can be quite devastating, or it can lead to something like this. So this train originated out of Iron Mountain, Utah, which is near Cedar City. And it’s mostly downhill all the way to California. There are some uphill sections, there’s a pretty significant uphill section between Las Vegas and Barstow, California. But it’s mostly downhill, so most of your power is needed for going uphill as far as the railroad is concerned, but you need that power for braking effort as well.
They skimped on this train. It was 22,000 tons approximately. But again, that is another one of these topics that is really debatable. And this is coming from local crews that work the area. They don’t know exactly how much that train weighs because there is no scale facility up at the Iron Mountain ore mine. That’s just standard practice to just overload those cars, and the springs are fully compressed. You can look at this train and realize that it’s overloaded. You don’t know exactly how much, you just know approximately how much it weighs. But it was 22,000 tons and it descends multiple 2% grades going into California. And the grade where this took place, if you’re familiar with Southern California and you’ve driven between Los Angeles and Las Vegas, if you’re familiar with a place called Baker, California, where the so-called world’s largest thermometer is, and then you start driving east going uphill, and it’s uphill, and you go up, and up, and up, and up in your car. And then there’s cars pulled over, overheated on the side of the road. And it just keeps going up, and up, and up, and up.
And finally, you get to the top of the hill and you drop down, and you kind of get into the valley where Vegas is. Well, that’s where this took place, just about 10 miles south. It’s the same grade. And it is exceedingly steep for trains, but it’s even worse than some of these other grades like Cajon because there are no curves on this grade. It’s very, very, very straight, so you have very steep, yes. And curves when you’re operating a train, curves kind of help to hold you back. If you’re in a curvy territory, it can kind of help to hold the train back. Didn’t have this, so that’s why the train reached such an intense level of speed. And I know that the second locomotive in the consist registered 138 miles per hour is the last GPS reading. It left the rail somewhere between 138 and 150 something miles an hour is where it left the rail. It derailed on a 60 mile an hour curve.
But going back to where we’re at, it originally started as 154 cars, a double length train. There were two engines on the front, one in the middle, two on the rear, and it was 22,000 tons. The other problem with this is that is an insignificant amount of power for descending a 2% grade. So in my territory when I handle trains of the exact same tonnage of soda ash originating in Wyoming that go to Portland and Seattle, we usually with twice that much power, usually two or three engines on the head in, five engines in the middle, and two on the rear to hold that much tonnage back. They did not have that. They were given inadequate amount of dynamic brakes and the inadequate amount of power for handling this train, especially going over the crest. And they had mechanical problems with it. It was delayed around the Las Vegas area for six, seven hours because it kept losing its air. It had air problems.
When they finally got the thing on the move and it starts heading south, it has air problems again at the crest of this grade as it’s starting to go over this grade down into the valley. But this time, when the air goes, when the air line separated, it broke in half behind the 55th car. And they’re going back to try to put the train together, and something happened. I can’t speak to exactly the details of it, but the air was not properly charged up enough to be able to hold the train back. That locomotives weren’t enough to hold that kind of crazy tonnage on the hill and the train started rolling forward. The engineer jumped when it was clear the train was a runaway to save his life. And it’s a damn good thing he did because he wouldn’t have made it. And the train was off to the races, and it rolled almost another 20 miles, almost to Kelso, before it derailed on a 60 mile an hour curve, as you were saying, doing 150 miles an hour.
And the railroad is going to throw this crew under the bus. I can state that as factual. They love to blame things on the crew. And I’m not going to state as to whether the crew did anything wrong or not, but we know that what we do know is that was a double length, excessive length train. And it was prone to mechanical problems already. Every single crew that works, Milford, Utah, Las Vegas, Nevada, all the way down to Barstow and West Colton, which is near San Bernardino, going down Cajon Pass, every crew has a story about this train. And that is coming again from people that work this territory that are intimately familiar with it.
And they all have stories about this train that’s underpowered, stories of potential, of almost a runaway, when they’ve had to throw the emergency brakes on to stop it. They all have stories and it’s been reported. Nothing gets done. It was a matter of when this was going to happen, not if. And that’s just how it happened. They’re going to blame the crew, but that crew never should’ve been put in that predicament of a broken train at the top of the hill, 154 car train. It never should’ve happened. They shouldn’t be running trains like that.
Mel Buer:
Yeah. It seems to me like a sort of systemic breakdown of what you would hope [inaudible 00:15:01] to be fail safes in place to ensure the safety of this train and the crew on it. So the air system is for the brakes. Right? So essentially what they’re doing is rather than spend the money to put more … If they want to make the trains that long, then they should have more of these engines, that’s sort of like your second fail-safe, I suppose.
Paul Lindsey:
Well, they’re not necessarily second fail-safe, they work together. But you definitely should have more locomotives because it’s just like with a truck with engine braking, you have something similar on locomotives called dynamic braking. So on trains, there’s no gears like on a truck. The wheels are actually giant electric motors. And all the diesel engine does is serves as a power plant to generate the electricity to power these electric motors. And by reversing the current on these traction motors, you create resistance through dynamic braking, and it’s spewed out the top of the locomotive, it’s heat. It converts. It converts mechanical energy into heat energy and puts it out the top of the locomotive and it creates resistance and holds you back. So ideally, yes, you want to have more locomotives equipped with dynamics on a heavy train like that, so you don’t have to rely as heavily on the air, and it’s more reliability. You don’t want to run 22,000 tons down a 2.2% grade, which again, that doesn’t sound like much to the general public. But on 22,000 tons, that is a lot.
Mel Buer:
That is a lot, yeah. Well, these trains are massive pieces of machinery, but they do have a point where it gets too heavy, and this is the logical outcome of that.
Paul Lindsey:
And I will say too, you mentioned that the trains should have more locomotives, and I agreed with that. So I’m not the only one that says that, so when the train gets to Barstow, California, so a place between Yermo and Barstow there, the Union Pacific line joins the BNSF line. And they actually share the same track going down towards San Bernardino, through that area. It’s a long-standing system that they’ve used for a long time, and they share the track through that location, but it’s owned by BNSF. This train as it sat, two by one by two, was not legal to get onto the BNSF. The BNSF will not allow that train as it is on their section of railroad. Only Union Pacific was ignorant enough to run that train like that.
Mel Buer:
Incredible, amazing.
Paul Lindsey:
They would have to add locomotives before it entered the BNSF.
Mel Buer:
Right. So even across the rail carriers, the standards are different. In terms of regulations and safety standards, it’s not uniform across the industry. Each rail carrier kind of has their own operating playbook is what I’m hearing. Yeah, that’s not great.
Paul Lindsey:
And there’s no standard on train length or anything like that. They can essentially just experiment with train length to infinity, no matter what safety risks there are. There’s nothing stopping them from gambling with public safety.
Mel Buer:
Which is, we’re seeing that played out in places like East Palestine, and really where any major derailment has happened. These communities are left to pick up the slack and try and figure out how to move forward from this.
Paul Lindsey:
And that is what an engineer, what is the understanding and skill of a locomotive engineer is to be able to keep the entire train running at the exact same speed at the exact same time with all that slack and everything. But when your train loses air and goes into emergency, and those brakes all set up at a different rate, you lose all that control. Of course, like you said, of course it’s going to jackknife.
Mel Buer:
Well, and it’s a terrifying thing when you think about just this one policy of making these trains longer and not having enough crew on them has just ravaged communities. ProPublica just came out with an investigation yesterday that they’d been doing. They were going through court documents and all this stuff. And they were using this case of, I think it was a 2017 derailment in a small town, where this track is going through people’s backyards, and it derailed so catastrophically that rail cars were being sent through people’s homes. And people were trapped in their homes. It was propane tanks and all this crazy stuff. Right? And we see the same thing in East Palestine. These tracks go through these communities and you have these catastrophic derailments, and we can … in pretty much every non collision derailment, you can kind of see that this is the direct result of rail carriers’ policies and wanting to maximize these profits. Longer trains, less trains, means you can send more freight. But at what cost? Right?
Paul Lindsey:
Exactly. At what cost? And they seem to be only obsessed with their internal cost, but they don’t realize the social cost they’re actually imposing across the entire US transportation network, and to another extent, actually the global transportation and logistics network by running these trains because they could run more trains, run them longer. They could potentially engage in some of this if they actually would take the capital and actually invest it back into their railroad to where it could handle it. But in most places, in a lot of places, they’re essentially wanting to run on infrastructure that really hasn’t been improved to any significant extent since the 1950s. I mean, I’ve heard a lot of people say that, “Oh, rail is antiquated and out of date.” Rail is not antiquated and out of date. Just a couple months ago, I was riding a train 100 miles an hour, or 190 miles an hour, between Florence, Italy and Rome, Italy. Rail is not antiquated and outdated. It’s amazing technology.
But if we were still flying planes and driving semi trucks and cars that were from the ’50s in this country, we’d think rail … We’d think road and aviation was antiquated as well. We essentially haven’t put any returned any capital back into the railroad, and they want to run these trains without investing in longer sidings, without investing in double track. And to some extent, running rail equipment that is just ancient, and is not being maintained, not getting proper air brake inspections, putting off car inspectors to where these cars, if it maybe needs to air hose gaskets, isn’t getting it done, maybe needs new brake shoes, but it’s not getting done because these trains are 150 cars long and it’s blocking the whole railroad and blocking every train on the main line. And we need to get it out of the terminal and kick it down to the next terminal. They can deal with it there. That’s kind of the whole mindset.
And so it leads to these safety issues, but it also leads to economic issues, even if it doesn’t result in derailment because I do want to emphasize that rail is safe. You know what’s unsafe, what is very, very unsafe, is having all of this freight on our highway system. But the issue is that we are not maintaining our infrastructure properly and managing it. We’re not putting capital back into the rail industry where it belongs. But so whenever rail, whenever these railroad companies don’t maintain any of their railroad, and they want to essentially raise the rates, the demurrage fees, the rates they charge customers, but they don’t want to put any capital back into the railroad. They’d rather put that into share buybacks and dividends.
What they’re doing is every customer that leaves, that flees rail, and decides I’m just going to switch over to truck, is essentially subsidizing the railroads using taxpayer funds because now they’re directing them onto a subsidized interstate highway system that is extremely expensive. And we spend tremendous amount of taxpayer dollar on our highway system, all because the railroads don’t want to invest in the longer sidings and double track. It’s absolutely unacceptable. And they like to claim that they’re some bastion of free market capitalism, but it isn’t. When you’re relying, when you’re saying, “Well, our competition is allegedly a taxpayer subsidized method of transportation,” you can’t claim free markets in that incident.
Mel Buer:
I think it’s important to note as well, bringing it back a little bit to safety inspections and all these things, we just published an op-ed from Carmen, who kind of gave us a clue into the same sort of pressures that PSR has sort of wrapped across all crafts within the rail industry, pressuring under threat of retaliation and discipline to get cars through quickly, to not spend as much time inspecting cars, to not bad order cars that need to be bad ordered, simply because they need to meet this golden ratio, operating ratio, 60% or what have you.
Paul Lindsey:
55 is what they were shooting for.
Mel Buer:
Yeah, which is insane because this is again a billion dollar industry that makes a lot of money. And speaking of wanting to make more money, I kind of want to take a moment to kind of talk about what happens after a train derails. So we’ve seen that the rail carriers usually waste no time in getting the track repaired and operational. In East Palestine, I think it was 12 hours, before the day was done, or they even considered cleaning up the hazmat situation, they had fixed the train track and they had reopened that corridor to freight moving through. The Southern California derailment took less than 24 hours for them to fix this and get things moving. It’s very evident that rail carriers care most about reducing the time of the delay, no matter what. This puts a strain on the overburdened workforce even more. Let’s kind of talk about what that process looks like because we did talk about how we don’t have independent sort of group that investigates these accidents. What’s kind of the fallout of what happens after a derailment?
Paul Lindsey:
Well, as far as the line being reopened as quickly as it was, specifically with the SEMA incident in Southern California, that was a masterful work of propaganda right there because immediately, less than 24 hours later, they had this screenshot going all over the internet, line is reopened less than 24 hours, no hazmat spilled and no injuries, making it just downplaying what actually happened. So when some like that happens, they have pre-built track panels that they bring in that they have stored in different places and they’ll bring them in and they’ll throw them down just like model railroad track and put a slow order on it, to where the trains aren’t moving very fast on it until they can get it permanently tamped down and everything. But they’ll get it open relatively quick, but it seems like in all of these incidents lately, they’re on damage control. They just want to show how they got it open quickly. Everyone forget about it. Go back to sleep.
But one of the reasons why they were able to get SEMA open so fast was because the train was going so fast when it left the rail, the entire train leaped from the rail and leapt 100 feet from the rail, so they didn’t even have wreckage to clean up off the track. It’s all laying 100 feet from the track because it left the rail going so fast. So they were just able to go in there, slap some track panels down, do some basic grading, and call the railroad open until they get it permanently tamped down. So they don’t want people discussing looking into this issue deeper and maybe remembering other cases where it was not in the desert. And even though it was in the desert, I will tell you too, it’s part of the Mojave National Preserve, which that’s a protected area. And it did cover that area in iron ore. But it could’ve happened in a very different place. It could’ve been like San Bernardino in 1989. Are you familiar with what happened there?
Mel Buer:
No, I’m not.
Paul Lindsey:
Well, so it was kind of an anomaly, kind of an incident and an anomaly at the time because, as I do want to emphasize, rail is safe. The practices of these businesses right now, these unchallenged monopolies, that is the unsafe practice. But in ’89, there was a fluke incident. You had an overloaded train carrying [inaudible 00:28:59] going from Mojave, California, going to Cajon Pass into LA for export. And it was a whole stage, a multi-stage, levels of failure that led to this. But the train lost control at the top of the grade going down Cajon, and it left the rails doing over 100 miles an hour, but it went right into a neighborhood in San Bernardino, and it crushed houses. You can still look at Google Maps of Duffy Street in San Bernardino and you can still see an entire chunk of the neighborhood where they never rebuilt houses. It eventually led to, and during the cleanup effort, damaging a pipeline, and a gas pipeline exploded. So this neighborhood dealt with a major train derailment, crushing houses, and then a gas explosion all within the same week.
But that incident, as I said, it was kind of isolated. It was a failure on multiple levels. One of them was that they didn’t know the weight of the cars. They weren’t weighing the cars. And so the cars came in without a set weight, and so they kind of … The terminal manager up in Mojave estimated the weight, and unfortunately, underestimated. Well, the federal government got involved and they changed the regulation on that. And now if you don’t know the weight of the car, it is automatically by default the max carrying capacity of that car. Sometimes it takes action coming in and setting regulatory standards because again, even back then in large part, they’re not capable of self-regulating, so something like that needs to happen here.
Mel Buer:
Well, that’s a perfect segue to my next question, frankly. In recent months, federal legislation has been introduced that could go a long way toward improving conditions in the rail industry, setting standards for better safety, hopefully upping penalties for rail carriers who flout safety and they cause catastrophes like in East Palestine. What are your thoughts about this legislation, or RWU’s thoughts about this legislation? What works? What doesn’t work? Are there any things that are kind of missing from this legislation that you think are really important for regulators to touch on? What are your thoughts about that?
Paul Lindsey:
Well, I do believe that we’re on the right track in discussing track side defect detectors, as far as East Palestine is concerned. Those are the detectors that are every 15 to 20 miles along the railroad right of way. And these detectors, the train goes by, it scans the axles and uses a reader to detect increases in temperatures on these axles. So these are safety devices, but one thing that is starting to really come out and people are starting to realize is that these are not actually regulated devices. The railroads can set the temperatures on these hotbox detectors to be whatever they want. And lately, they can, and they have been, silencing these detectors to where crews can’t even hear what the exit message is. And they’ll send these exit messages to wherever the railroad headquarters is, and some bureaucratic middleman will look at the information and decide that’s worth telling the crew, or that’s not worth telling the crew. And that’s what happened with East Palestine.
And actually, I made a video on that, and that’s why the railroad is actually retaliating against me right now. And I haven’t worked in a month because they’ve had me pulled out of service for talking to the media and talking about this incident, specifically over those detectors. So I’m happy to see these detectors be discussed by federal regulators because they are unregulated. They’re there. The railroads have been putting those in and using them for decades, many decades, but they are not actually regulated and there are no set standards on them, so I do like that. I also like that multiple states, as well as federally, they’re discussing two person crews on every train. And a lot of states are discussing train lengths and setting train lengths, which should not be controversial. It should not be controversial to set maximum train lengths or tonnages. We have that for trucks. We have that for semi trucks. We have on our public highways, you can look up at any time for any state, what the max length and tonnage for a semi truck is.
So I don’t think that should be controversial at all to discuss train length, so I do like that that’s being discussed. That being said, I think regulators are missing a much broader change that needs to be looked at, and that is that the rail infrastructure in this country is absolutely vital. It’s something that we have just been cutting and cutting an abandoning and neglecting, and ripping out lines for decades. And that’s going to continue happening unless we protect this infrastructure, and unless we set standards on this infrastructure. And also, we need to look at it and realize this infrastructure does not have any competition really. I mean, there’s a few places maybe that’s left where there’s a little bit of rail competition, but really, in large part these are regulated duopolies, and they’re barely regulated anymore. They, as far as I’m concerned, they violate antitrust law in pretty much every way. And we need to discuss, we need to actually open up the dialogue and discuss fundamental changes that need to occur to the industry.
That would be no different than the Staggers Rail Act of the ’80s, which was deregulation. And that act needed to happen at that time. The railroads were going bankrupt. That’s a long story. But I feel like we’re at a turning point now, and we need to discuss whether it is actually appropriate for the rails themselves to be maintained and ignored and decided on their fate. We need to decide whether it is appropriate for that to be in the hands of a private monopoly. And yeah, what I’m discussing is public ownership of the rail system, just like our interstate highways and our airports. That needs to be discussed. That doesn’t mean that all of the rail companies will be consolidated into some giant government boondoggle. That’s not what I’m implying at all. I’m saying that the rails need to be …
We need to at least open the dialogue and discussion about the rails in private hands and realize that maybe it’s time that they need to be treated more like the interstates. And if these railroads want to run on these rails, then maybe they need to pay rent to use the rails. And that would also open up competition to where companies could actually compete with each other. And it would severely disease-incentivize these railroads from embargoing customers like they were, well, they’re still doing, embargoing customers and hijacking the US economy by just refusing to haul freight in violation of their common carrier obligations. So yeah, long-winded way of saying that we need to actually open up the dialogue and realize that maybe our system with rail is broken and it needs to be redesigned in a way that we can ensure that we don’t lose any more rails to abandonment and neglect, and we can actually control the highway themselves and turn it into a toll road. These railroads can pay to use it.
Mel Buer:
Right. So you know they’re not hurting for money.
Paul Lindsey:
No.
Mel Buer:
Well, and I think that the COVID pandemic really kind of opened up this conversation and really laid bare just exactly how fragile our supply chain actually is. And this is part of the reporting that I did last summer when the contract negotiations were heating up. The reality is that rail infrastructure in this country is vital to the continued operation of smoothly running supply chain, both domestically and globally. Right?
Paul Lindsey:
Yes.
Mel Buer:
Without having a smooth running rail system, truck freight can’t pick up the slack as much as people think they could. You know what I mean? It needs to be there. Our economy is built around this. These consistent catastrophes that happen in these communities can cause a ripple effect that just causes the entire economy and supply chain to slow down or implode in some regions. Right? We all have heard those stories and saw images of the ports backed up and all of these things happening. And it was exacerbated by the pandemic for sure. And I think it’s been heartening to see that the rail unions are really trying to push for, frankly, logical solutions to this problem. Right? Because y’all give a shit, y’all care. You know?
Paul Lindsey:
Care about our industry.
Mel Buer:
Yeah. And I think public ownership of the rail industry seems like a common sense sort of solution. Right? It certainly would make it easier for the federal government to better regulate safety standards across all rail carriers and to really kind of just make communities safer because this is a big piece of our economy.
Paul Lindsey:
I would say too, on top of that, it would, and I know there’s going to be a lot of people listening and shaking their heads and trying to claim Marxism or socialism, or whatever we want to say about it. But like it or not, our interstate highways are extremely socialized, and so is our aviation, our airline industry. So airports are dispatched by government employees, their air traffic controllers. And if you look at most airports, a lot of them are not profitable. If you look at regional airports that maybe have two or three flights per day, and yet, they somehow off of the revenue off of three planes a day, somehow they have the revenue to provide the maintenance on the runways, the people on the ground, the fuel crews, the deicing crews, the lighting to light the runway, the electricity for the terminal, the air traffic controller, the TSA agents, the baggage handlers, the traffic, the security guards, everything that goes into that.
And somehow, three flights a day into that regional airport pays for it. No. They’re paid for by heavy, heavy government subsidies. And people don’t realize that. It’s not some bastion of free market capitalism. And then on top of that, got to say it, every 10 years, we seem to bail out the airline industry too. They can just be incompetent and we’ll just bail them out every 10 years.
Mel Buer:
Right. That’s a good place to sort of kind of wind down the conversation. If the rail industry were to be nationalized or public ownership, what are some of the changes that we would see with its operation with regards to the workforce, if any, or policies? What are some of the things that in this scenario, what would play out? What would we see different?
Paul Lindsey:
Well, something that I would see that would be definitely different is that there would be entire areas of the national rail network where multiple railroads would be able to enter the market and compete. So let’s take somewhere like Idaho here at home. If you go out to the Boise area going out to Ontario and and Napa and this area here, there’s lot os onion sheds. There’s also a lot of sugar beet growers around this area. And there’s multiple sugar beet plants. And they used to haul all of this stuff by rail, but Union Pacific has shunned a lot of this business because they go for the highest revenue business and essentially shun away the business that maybe doesn’t give them as much revenue as they’d like. And so because of this, there’s all of these empty sugar beet areas where they used to load trains, and there’s all kinds of empty onion factories, where there’s no rail cars in there. All they do is haul them out by truck because Union Pacific is able to just shun these customers away.
Well, if it was an open access rail system like that, nothing is really stopping the onion growers from coming together and buying their own locomotives and moving their own cars. Nothing’s stopping them from doing that, moving it to the local terminal that instead of just being served by Union Pacific, maybe it’s served by three railroads because they all share the same common infrastructure that cannot be ignored, cannot be … You can’t shortcut maintenance on because it’s actually maintained as a vital piece of infrastructure. And those are some of the changes I could see. There could be a lot of customers that right now have access to rail service in theory, but in reality, don’t, that would all of a sudden have access to rail service, which would result in fewer trucks on our highway.
And like you said earlier, a lot of people don’t realize that the trucks are not able to handle all of this business. I will say one thing about rail, there’s a lot of people that think that trucks can just stand in and take care of all this business. For one, if you advocate that, you’re advocating for the government and the taxpayers to pay for this, in which case, can’t really claim that government doesn’t have a place in maintaining roadways. But for two, in a lot of cases, say like soda ash in Wyoming, where one of those trains is the weight of about 550 truckloads, and they run one or two of those each day, not only would they not have enough trucks to run it, they just flat out wouldn’t run it. The soda ash would just stay in Wyoming. There’s a lot of commodities that are hauled by rail that just would not be hauled at all if it had to go to trucks. It just wouldn’t be economical anymore.
So if you were to have a system like this, where the trucks were open access and maintained properly, and invested in proper capital, or properly capitalized like the interstates have been, modernized, there’d be a lot of commodities that should be getting to market by rail that haven’t been, that potentially could be.
Mel Buer:
Very cool, yeah. We are kind of near the end of our questions here. But I do kind of want to just open this up and do what I always do when I’m talking to someone who’s way more knowledgeable about something than I am. Did I miss anything? Is there anything that you feel adds to this conversation about derailments and looking forward, and how to solve this problem that the rail industry has put itself in, that you think we haven’t touched on that would be important to say?
Paul Lindsey:
Maybe just emphasis on the share buyback program. We’ve discussed it a little bit, but I’ll give an actual number. In 2022, Union Pacific bought back $7 billion of its own shares. That $7 billion, that is way more than they spent on capital investment on the rail, and that’s way more than they spent on every single conductor, engineer, time keeper, dispatcher, terminal manager, superintendent, yard master, all across the entire system is more than they paid for it. That went right into Wall Street’s pocket. And that all could’ve gone into growing and expanding the industry. But they don’t believe in returning capital back to their industry because I don’t think that they even care if there’s a rail industry in 10 years, as long as they can just move onto the next carcass to pick dry, whatever industry that happens to be. So we just happen to be the one that they’ve been picking dry for the last few years. But I wanted to emphasize the share buybacks.
Mel Buer:
All those billions and they held out for two years on sick days for half the crew. God.
Paul Lindsey:
Yes. Yeah.
Mel Buer:
It’s so hard to sometimes wrap your head around just the sheer amount of money that they are willing to keep out of the hands of workers who make their money for them. Every time I have these conversations with workers, it’s always the same thing. Same thing with the Kellogg’s workers, Kellogg’s was willing to pay millions of dollars to keep people on strike instead of just give them a raise. And it’s really just incredible to, and I say that sort of pejoratively, it’s mind-numbingly awful that the workers and communities are the ones who … They pass the buck on to us, and then we’re left dealing with the consequences of them having insatiable appetites for accruing money. It’s just money.
Paul Lindsey:
Yeah. Money. Money and power. Power I think is probably their most desired currency. These people, they desire power. It’s the same kind of narcissism that encourages someone like, for example, one of these like Lance Fritz at Union Pacific. As old as he is now, and he’s not ancient, but up there in age, I know if I was up there around 60 years old, if I had the kind of money and capital that he has placed into his own pocket with share buybacks and dividends, I wouldn’t feel the need to work.
I’d be enjoying my life, spending time with family, something that I don’t get to do at the railroad because they consume my entire life and existence. And I would be spending time with my family and enjoying the company of people and traveling and seeing the world. And yet, he’s the kind of narcissist that wants to operate a Fortune 500 company, even though he has … I believe his last net worth was around $170 million right on … Easily Google searched. And now, from what I understand, he wants to go into politics now. What kind of narcissist won’t just enjoy their life when they have that kind of capital to live off of?
Mel Buer:
Right. Yeah. They want everything. They’re, like I said, insatiable.
Paul Lindsey:
Yes. Power.
Mel Buer:
There’s no end to it. Yeah. When you have everything, what else is there to grab?
Paul Lindsey:
Exactly.
Mel Buer:
Well, thanks again, Paul, for joining us. I really appreciate you taking the time to talk to me about this today. I’ve been kind of on this beat for a while, and every time I talk to rail workers, I come away from the conversation feeling whole. So please let folks know where to find you, your TikTok, WRU’s organization website, and spell it out for us.
Paul Lindsey:
Railroad Workers United, definitely look up that organization. That’s not a union. It is basically a labor action organization to bring better change into the railroad industry, but also just for workers and really the United States and the entire rail transportation industry. And then I have my personal TikTok channel, callingoutcorruption, one word. And that’s a little project I do, and I try to write and get the message out when I can. So maybe I don’t consume my entire life with it, but I try.
Mel Buer:
TikTok has that magic of getting you stuck in a whole for 12 hours. Cool. Well, we’ll make sure to link your TikTok and the WRU website in our podcast page when we publish this. That’s it for us here at The Real News Network Podcast. Once again, I’m Mel Buer, associate editor of The Real News. Feel free to follow us on your favorite social media as we continue to bring independent and free journalism straight to your webpage. Until next time.
