Class II railroads

Roads having operating revenues above 1,000,000 annually Class II Railroads... 

Class II railroads have 70% higher rates of trespasser fatalities (per billion train miles) and collisions (per million train miles) than Class I railroads, and about a 50% higher rate of derailments per million train miles (Savage, 1998, pg.ll9). 

The safety record of the smaller railroads can be investigated using FRA data. Table 15.3 shows accident and fatality-rate data for the years 1994-96 for three different sizes of railroads the large Class I railroads, the medium-size Class II railroads, and the small Class III railroads who are defined as having less than 400,000 employee-hours per year. In rough terms. Class III would be equivalent to those railroads shown in table 15.1 as moving less than 40,000 carloads a year. 

The most notable difference is in the rate of collisions and derailments. The rate of collisions is similar to that of class II railroads, but twice that of the Class I railroads. Derailments occur almost four times as frequently as on Class I railroads and over twice as frequently as on Class II railroads. Of course part of the explanation is that the smaller railroads are engaged in switching operations, which is highly susceptible to collisions and derailments in comparison with line-haul operations. Another explanation is poor track condition, occasioned by years of low investment prior to the sale by the large railroads. Fortunately, the consequences are mitigated by low operating speeds. 

The second is that the FRA like the FHWA faces the problem that even bad small carriers have accidents so infrequently that annual accident rates are not a useful guide for evaluating safety performance. This would be the case for all Class III and some of the Class II railroads. The FRA would have to rely on other pieces of information. 

Employee fatalities and injuries per million employee hours are shown in figure 20.2. The Class I railroads have the lowest rate at 9.5 fatalities and injuries per million employee hours. Class II freight railroads have injury rates about seventy percent higher than the Class I railroads. In general the injury rates for the various Class II railroads are closely grouped around the mean with no railroad having an injury rate of more than twice the mean. Commuter railroads have an injury rate two-and-a-half times that of the Class I railroads. 

It is more difficult, but not impossible as explained in a later chapter, to draw meaningful comparisons between the accident rates of the smaller Class II freight railroads. These twenty-four railroads average eight-and-one-half collisions and derailments each a year, and accident rates will vary markedly from year to year due to statistical fluctuations explained by the Poisson distribution. For the small. Class III, railroads meaningful statistical inference is impossible, even if the data were published individually by railroad by the FRA. The 275 different corporate entities average only 0.7 collisions and derailments each a year. 

An obvious response to the problem of uninformed customers making incorrect decisions is to mount a public-information campaign. In general, all the public needs to know are historical data on the accident performance, or safety outputy of individual railroads. Much of this information is already available. The FRA s Accident / Incident Bulletin for a calendar year is available with a delay of about nine months. Midyear data are available with a delay of a couple of month. The information is available in hardcopy and on the FRA s World Wide Web site. An interested customer can quite quickly obtain information on the rate of collisions and derailments for the largest Class I and II railroads, and can observe recent trends in these rates for individual railroads. 

This section takes the theoretical discussion of the previous section and applies it to data on Class I and II railroads in the early 1990s. The objective of the analysis is to observe whether the performance of individual railroads was worse in 1994 and 1995 than it was in the earlier part of the decade. Analysis of this type will permit identification of those railroads which the FRA might suspect are indulging in reduced prevention. 

Xj 94 is the overall occurrence rate for that subsection of the industry to which railroad i belongs in 1994. For this purpose the industry was split into three segments Class I railroads. Class II freight railroads, and Class II conunuter railroads and Xj 91.93 is the overall occurrence rate for that subsection of the industry to which railroad i belongs in 1991-93. 

Among the Class II freight railroads the Belt Railroad of Chicago the Duluth Missabe and Iron Range the Elgin, Joliet and Eastern the Union Railroad of... 

Among the Class II commuter passenger railroads the Long Island Railroad had an increasing number of collisions and derailments and increased employee casualties were at the Northeast Illinois, Northern Indiana, and Southeastern Pennsylvania systems. 

Trunk Western and the Soo Line have higher than predicted employee casualties. Among the Class II freight railroads the Alaska, Bangor and Aroostook Chicago, Central and Pacific Dakota, Minnesota and Eastern Indiana Harbor Belt Paducah and Louisville and the Wisconsin Central have statistically-significant elevated employee casualties. The same is also true of the Northern Indiana, Port Authority Trans Hudson, and Southeastern Pennsylvania commuter passenger systems. 

The larger Class I and II and passenger railroads must submit copies of their operating rules to the FRA. The smaller Class III railroads must have them available at their main offices. Records of testing and inspection of track and equipment must be kept for one year, and there must be tests of employees to ensure that they are familiar with the operating rules. 

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