Rail Industry Interviews

In order to examine the impact of economic deregulation on safety in the railroad industry, the existing literature provides a good starting point. Nevertheless, it leaves several questions imanswered. In particular, studies to date do not adequately address issues related to the impact of deregulation and the subsequent industry restructuring on human performance factors, such as  

The interviews were conducted between July and September 1999, and took approximately one hour to complete on average. Eight of the ten interviews were conducted by phone and two in person all but one were tape-recorded. To avoid leading the respondents, the interviews were structiured such that the first questions were open-ended in nature, with subsequent questions focusing on specific issues. 

The responses of corporate management to our questions often differed sharply from those of labor, while the FRA seemed to weigh in as a more neutral observer. Overall, however, the respondents were surprisingly candid. In the next section, we summarize our interviews with rail industry representatives. (Some of the quotes that follow have been slightly edited to protect the confidentiality of our sources.) 

1 The most important safety issues in the railroad industry 

Railroad labor often cited problems related to the steady decrease in crew sizes, including fatigue and increased pressure from management to 

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The experiences of the airline industry with maintenance violations and falsification of records after deregulation, and the widespread concerns about under-reporting of safety problems identified in the rail industry interviews, raise another note of caution here. In particular, there is some indication that financial and union difficulties in the airline industry exacerbated the incentives for some airlines to cut comers on maintenance (Transportation Research Board, 1991, pg. 184). To the extent that deregulation causes similar stresses within the nuclear power industry, some companies may face similar incentives to ignore or under-report safety problems, and/or avoid regulatory sanctions by evasion rather than by enhanced maintenance efforts. This is consistent with the prediction that less effort may be devoted to issues that are perceived as gray areas, but can have unforeseen safety consequences. 

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