The sticking point between railroads and rail worker unions over a federal hotline for reporting safety concerns is how to ensure rail employees don’t misuse the system to avoid discipline, the head of the railroads’ trade group said in a letter Thursday to government officials.

The impasse is over how the confidential close call reporting system (C3RS) should handle situations in which an employee makes repeat calls over a “known event” — one in which a railroad might be already aware of a situation that might compromise safety or doesn’t follow company safety guidelines, but the employee reports the event as a means to avoid discipline.

The Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) is in charge of the program, although individual railroads may have their own confidential tip lines. Calls for the railroads to join FRA’s program intensified after the Feb. 3 derailment of a Norfolk Southern train in East Palestine, Ohio. 

“If an employee repeatedly uses the system in this way simply to avoid discipline, the basic objective of the C3RS concept is thwarted. The focus of the program shifts from prevention of accidents to employment protection,” Ian Jefferies, president of the Association of American Railroads, told Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and FRA Administrator Amit Bose.

The railroads view the close call reporting system as a way to report safety concerns that have typically occurred because of another employee’s actions or inaction in not complying with established safety protocols.

“FRA has recently emphasized the importance of nurturing a strong safety culture at the railroads, as well as the need for employers to address risky behaviors that jeopardize the safety of both fellow employees and the public. Resolving the current disagreement over reasonable limits on the repeated reporting of known events is essential to those objectives,” Jefferies said.

The railroads want limits on how many times an employee can report known risks. While employees would not have any limits when reporting unknown events, they would only be able to report known events or risks once every three years without facing disciplinary action. The way that airlines have set up their confidential reporting systems should serve as an example, according to Jefferies.

The airline industry’s reporting system, which is operated by NASA, enables airline employees to be immune from discipline when reporting events, whether the event is known or unknown, but that ability is limited to only once every five years in order to prevent misuse by repeat rule violators, Jefferies said.

“In the interest of public safety and with the understanding that society’s tolerance for risks related to freight railroads’ operation is extremely low, permitting an employee to violate the same safety rule three times in three years (or potentially violate three or more different rules three times each in three years) when the railroad already knows about the violation, without any risk of consequence, subjects the railroads, their employees, and the public to an unacceptable degree of risk,” Jefferies said. 

He also said Class I railroads are individually exploring integrating their existing confidential reporting systems with FRA’s system.

But the unions disagree. They are calling for employees to be eligible for three allowances every three years for each different rule violation, even when the railroad already knows about the incidents being reported, according to Jefferies.

AAR’s letter comes after the Transportation Trades Department of the AFL-CIO recently addressed letters to the six Class I railroad CEOs, asking them why they haven’t yet signed on to FRA’s close call reporting system even though they said in March that they would join the program.

TTD is a coalition representing 37 member unions, including the unions representing locomotive engineers and train conductors.

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