(The following story by Stacie Hamel appeared on the Omaha World-Herald website on January 5.)
OMAHA, Neb. — Reflective stripes will be required on the sides of locomotives and freight railcars to help make them more visible to motorists, under a final rule published this week in the Federal Register.
According to the Federal Railroad Administration, crashes in which motor vehicles run into trains at highway rail crossings comprise nearly a fourth of all collisions at crossings.
Motorists might have difficulty detecting trains because of their size and dark color, combined with poor lighting or limited visibility, the FRA said. Reflectors are expected to help reduce the number and severity of such accidents.
As of March 4, the new rule will require railroads to install yellow or white reflectors on locomotives over five years and on freight railcars over 10 years. Existing locomotives and railcars could have reflectors added during periodic maintenance or repair, the FRA said.
Officials for the Omaha-based Union Pacific Railroad – the nation’s largest – were still examining the rule Tuesday and had no comment.
A spokesman for the Association of American Railways said the rule has been developed over time, and some industry comments were incorporated.
The association’s Tom White said the group also was still examining the final rule. The industry will take the next few months to develop a plan for implementing the rule.
The rule allows a good amount of time for installing the reflectors, White said.
The total cost of adding reflectors to the industry’s nearly 1.3 million freight railcars will be more than $90 million, he said.
“If it were done on a faster pace, you might have an awful lot of freight cars out of service,” he said.
In 2002, the AAR’s most recent data, class 1 railroads owned about 470,000 of a total 1.28 million railcars. Non-class 1 railroads owned about 125,000. Shippers and leasing companies owned about 607,000.
The industry isn’t starting from scratch, White pointed out. The Association of American Railways estimates that approximately 20 percent of freight railcars already have reflectors.
The Federal Railroad Administration’s last rule addressing rail crossing safety was a regulation requiring locomotives to have headlamps and auxiliary lights to help motorists better judge the distance and speed of approaching trains.
Since 1994, the number of vehicle-train collisions at highway rail crossings has decreased by 41 percent and the number of fatalities has dropped by 47 percent, the FRA said.