U.S. Leads World In Train Derailments

The East Palestine, Ohio, Norfolk Southern train disaster has been the most horrifyingly spectacular thus far, but more than a dozen train derailments had already taken place in the United States this year alone, Branko Marcetic reported for Jacobin Magazine.

Photo Insert: A drone shot of the 2023 Ohio train derailment

The weeks that followed added several more: a train carrying coal derailing near Gothenburg, Nebraska; another chemical-bearing train going off the trails near Detroit, this one also operated by the same Norfolk Southern company behind the East Palestine crash; a pickup truck smashing into a train in New Caney, Texas, sending 16 train cars off the rails.

A shocking number of train derailments take place in the US every year: An average of 1,705, or 54,570 over the span of 1990 to 2021, according to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics (BTS).

While falling after 2008, the next 13 years still saw more than 1,000 derailments a year, killing a total of thirty-one people and injuring 1,759.

Derailments in the US are a particularly bad problem compared to other countries. While recording 777 million train-kilometers in 2019 (train-kilometers are the measure of a train traveling the distance of one kilometer), 1,338 derailments took place in the country.

The EU, by contrast, only saw 73 derailments that year despite, by one count, recording 4.5 billion train-kilometers. For Japan, the same year saw more than 2 billion train-kilometers and only nine derailments.

In fact, the number of derailments in Japan over the past 21 years alone is roughly 12.5% of the number the US sees on average in a single year.

What’s behind this? The fact that Norfolk Southern’s accident rate was ticking up at the same time its profits were rising and its executives were assuring investors they’d keep costs down offers a clue.

More Perfect Union slams Norfolk Southern for engaging in what’s known as “precision scheduled railroading,” which means transporting more train cars and carrying heavier loads with a fraction of the workers.

This scheme allowed the company to splurge a gargantuan $4.7 billion on dividends and stock buybacks, a 4,500 percent increase from two decades earlier, enriching their shareholders.

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