For FRA, will 1997 be a year of consensus building?

Railway Age, Jan, 1997 by Gus Welty

The Federal Railroad Administration has taken considerable and understandable pride in recent times for its successes in bringing people together. First, Administrator Jolene Molitoris held a series of brown-bag-lunch all-day sessions in which representatives of a wide range of interests spent a day discussing key subjects in railroading.

FRA also undertook, successfully, what was billed as the first negotiated rulemaking. Under usual procedure, FRA would have proposed a rule and then all concerned would have gotten together to argue about it. But for this rule, on roadway worker safety, Administrator Molitoris got the concerned parties together first. They reached agreement on what the rule ought to say; it then went speedily through the prescribed channels and was published as a final rule Dec. 16.

Then came the most ambitious venture into consensus building, with creation of the Railroad Safety Advisory Committee (RSAC), a group in which the spectrum of interests was represented. ILSAC got tossed a few hot-potato issues, and consensus building suddenly looked like an iffy proposition.

Already, consensus lost out in deliberations over a new rule on track safety standards. There was general agreement, it's understood, among members of a working group. But then when the issue went before the full committee, the Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way Employes decided it wanted a review of the proposals by its field officers. Result: The proposal from ILSAC is going through the clearance process with a dissent from rail labor attached.

Still, the Administrator says the process was "a fertile one, a constructive one." She would have been pleased, of course, if it had worked out differently, but, she points out, the process was designed to provide an opportunity for dissent.

The next issue in the ILSAC pipeline may be no less controversial. This one deals with revisions to power brake regulations, and the controversy predates the Molitoris tenure. Work on a new rule had begun under a previous regime, and when Molitoris held hearings on the resulting proposal, it was firestorm time, with railroads calling it one of the worst rules ever proposed.

FRA backed off, and the issue eventually got to ILSAC, and there are serious questions again as to whether anything resembling consensus can be reached. A meeting last November was "non-conclusive," and if a session scheduled for Jan. 23 turns out the same way, then it will be back to business-as-usual with FRA itself proposing the rule.

Then, under the heading of "really hot potatoes", FRA has before it a request from the United Transportation Union for emergency orders prohibiting Wisconsin Central from operating trains with one-person crews and prohibiting all railroads from operating locomotives or trains by use of remote control devices.

Despite the controversies that may break out this year, though, FRA can point to a record of accomplishment in '96. It made a start toward creating railroad-union-state-FRA partnerships to enhance safety on a cooperative basis. Its Technical Resolution Committee program to resolve on a uniform basis complex questions of regulatory interpretation and application seems to be working well. It secured voluntary agreement from railroads to accelerate use of two-way end-of-train devices, first on trains operating in mountain territory and then on all through trains.

-Gus Welty