What East Palestine can tell us about the rail industry

I'm Arcadia Strovsky and the host of a new podcast from The Economist called Next Year in Moscow. For many Russians, Vladimir Putin's full-scale innovation of Ukraine also felt like an attack on their own country's future. Hundreds of thousands fled. I've been talking to this new exiles because their stories helped bring to life the mystery of why this senseless war began and how it might end. Next year in Moscow from The Economist is out now on your podcast app. Join me today and start listening. I'm John Guunhill and today on The Weeds, we're getting into the policies that are supposed to keep our trains on track. My name is Jennifer Hamindy and I'm the chair of the National Transportation Safety Board. I can tell you this much. This was 100% preventable. By now, you've likely heard about East Palestine, Ohio. My name is Wayne Vable. I grew up in Darnit and Township, Pennsylvania and remarried my wife had moved East Palestine and 31 years ago. So I've been in East Palestine for 31 years. My colleague, Benji Jones, a senior environmental reporter here at Vox, recently drove through East Palestine and talked to residents about their experiences in the wake of last month's trained derailment. That's where he met Wayne and his wife, Gail. I was sitting in my lazy boy and when I heard the dogs responded and so Gail and I looked out the windows and we seen the fire from here. We could see the fire from here very clear. I mean, we thought all of downtown was on fire. You know, until people started posting on Facebook, I thought Market Street was on fire. It was taller than any building we have in town. And then all day, Saturday, we kept watching. You know, we could see the smoke. We could see the flames. A lot of the conversation has been about the environment and the health impacts on residents. And that makes sense. People are scared about the water they're drinking and the air that they're breathing. Whale roads are a fixture. They're part of our landscape. There are about 140,000 miles of track in the United States. And I think it's safe to say, most people don't think of the trains running through our towns and cities all that often. That was the case in East Palestine. It was just a means of transportation for moving goods from one point to the other. I mean, the trains are every 15 minutes on a regular basis, so it's just part of life. Yeah. After a while, you don't hear them. We sure hear them now. As we were talking about this story here at the weeds, we kept wondering how this happened in the first place. And if there's any policy to prevent it from happening again. But in order to understand the regulatory landscape, we first need to know how the modern rail industry functions. And for that, I knew just who to call. My name is Joanna Marsh. I'm a senior staff reporter at Freight Waves, which is an online news publication on Freight Transportation. And I cover the US and Canadian Freight railroads for them. Okay, Joanna, can you talk us through what happened on February 3rd in East Palestine, Ohio? Just before 9pm local time, there was a Norfolk Southern train that was running nearby the town of East Palestine, Ohio, which is located near the border of Ohio and Pennsylvania. As it ran by the town, the train derailed. And safety investigators think that a possible cause of that train derailment could be an overheated wheel bearing. In other words, the wheels were running on the rail car, but the bearing got really, really, really hot to the point that the wheels kind of fell off the track. And that caused multiple cars to derail, I think, about maybe like 38 cars. And some of those cars were tank cars that were carrying chemical substances and hazardous materials. So there was concern that some of the hazardous materials, particularly vital chloride, which is used in the production of plastics. There were chemical reactions occurring inside the tank car, and there was concern that the tank car would explode and then it would just get really ugly from there. A few days later, on Monday, Norfolk Southern decided to conduct a controlled release of the vital chloride. As a result, you saw this really big, black, gray cloud over the skies. Also, because of the chemicals involved in the train derailment, there was concern, and there is still concern among the surrounding communities, including Pennsylvania, about how air quality might be affected, how water quality might be affected. I want to talk about the modern rail industry. Who are the big players when it comes to trains now? It's interesting because a lot of people don't realize there's actually a lot of railroad companies operating in the United States. According to the Federal Railroad Administration, there are over 800 freight and passenger railroads. So of course, that includes your subways and your commuter rails and Amtrak. But take that apart, you still have hundreds of railroad companies, and there are three economic classes of railroads. They divide them up by how much money railroad companies make. You have your smallest companies who serve the mom and pop towns. They serve the small towns, the few companies or shippers that might be there. We want to transport their crushed stone somewhere hundreds of miles away, or farmers who want to sell their soybeans to Asia or something. And then you have a slightly larger size, which means they make more money and they generate more revenue. And those include of course small railroads that might cover a wider territory, or they might include companies who have several of these smaller rail assets throughout the country or in a certain region. These two kinds of railroads are called short line railroads. The last category consists of the biggest railroads, and they're the ones who have thousands of miles of track who make millions of dollars and who spend millions of dollars, and they're called the Class One railroads. The Class One railroads, there are seven of them right now in the United States and Canada. Two of them actually are in Canada, although they both have operations in the US, and then the other five are headquartered in the US. And within that you have two that serve the Eastern US, CSX and Norfolk Southern. You have two that serve the Western US, BNSF and Union Pacific, and then you kind of have one that serves the Central Midwest region, which is Kansas City Southern. The biggest railroads, Class One railroads also get a lot of scrutiny as well because they are so visible. All of them except BNSF are publicly traded, so you could invest in any of those companies in their stock. I know typically when I think of trains, I think of Amtrak, you know, I think of getting on the train in DC and taking it up to Philly or taking it up to New York or Boston. But it seems like that's just sort of a slice of, you know, trains in the United States. There's this freight component, and Norfolk Southern is a freight train company. But how much stuff is, you know, getting from place to place via railroad? The bulk of freight goods are transported by truck, but rail handles a sizable portion of it as well. So a lot of what rail handles are sort of bulk commodities and things that you might not necessarily need right away. So things like coal or grain or energy products, such as ethanol or crude oil. Other commodities that the railroads carry include automotive parts and vehicles. And it's interesting with the automotive parts and vehicles because those components kind of go back and forth between the US and Canada and Mexico. So, you know, your car might have parts that are produced in Canada and US and is actually like put together in Mexico. And then kind of go back into the US via train. There are also a type of rail car called inner model or inner model cars or inner model containers, I guess. And those are ones that carry your import goods, things that might come from the ports inland. Can you put this particular East Palestine derailment in context? How often do trains derail? Is this an allure or is this just a very prominent example of something that happens quite a bit? Trained derailments among the class run railroads actually happened quite a bit. I'm looking at for railroad administration data. So between January and November 2022, there were 818 trained derailments reported to FRA out of like 1049 totals. And that number, it's actually slightly lower than 2020 and 2021 numbers, which are like covering around like 870. And then if you kind of look back over 10 years, you know, you actually see that derailments have kind of gone up and down, but kind of have been trending lower in the last three years. Sort of the highest number I think since 2013 seems to be 1072 in 2015. It's interesting what happened East Palestine as well, because it's not an unusual cause to have overheated bearings. The Federal Railroad Administration issued a safety advisory telling the railroads to look at their safety programs regarding safety and operational programs regarding hot box detectors. Now, hot box detectors are what they call like wayside detectors and wayside detectors are just these devices that are next to a track. And they kind of monitor the safety conditions of the train while the train passes through. So you have a train going through and then, you know, the hot box detector kind of gauges the temperature of the bearings and of the wheels on the rail car, just, you know, just to make sure everything's okay. And they put out the safety advisory because one of the potential causes of the Norfolk Southern train derailment might be an overheated bearing. And so if you look at the preliminary investigation report that the National Transportation Safety Board put out, there is discussion about like how the Norfolk Southern hot box detectors reported. The temperature of the bearings increasing along three detectors at set distances from the derailment site. And even though those detectors noticed that the temperature was rising, those temperature increases and the actual temperatures themselves. They didn't meet the threshold levels for for stopping the train. And it's just isn't because each railroad has different threshold levels for for when to stop a train. Yeah. So wait, it's not standardized across all of them. It's not standardized. I'm not sure to the extent of how much of that has been discussed. I will say, generally speaking, that there are technical committees outside of the Federal Railroad Administration that kind of talk about, you know, wayside detectors and, you know, and how far they should be. But, but yeah, I don't know how much of it, how much of the discussion has been around like, should we should we standardize these thresholds? Although that might, of course, be a topic, you know, going forward. What constitutes a derailment because it sounds like they're happening more often than a lot of us realize. I think if every derailment was like East Palestine, we would hear about them a lot more, but it sounds like these go under the radar quite a bit. Well, I think part of the reason why you don't hear about derailments as much is because they might be occurring in places where there's just, you know, frankly, aren't very many people around. So the, you know, you think they're, I think they're like 140,000 miles of railroad track in the United States. And so you have like large swaths of, you know, just the railroad track in the middle of like the Nebraska Plains or something. So that may be part of it and part of it too might be that the derailment isn't as flashy. Like it might not have resulted in multiple cars derailing or what derailed didn't cause tank cars to heat up their chemicals and, you know, cause an explosion. So as for why train derailments occur, there are various reasons. You know, one could be how the track has been maintained. So you have people in terms of like unionized workers and technology in terms of like automatic track inspection. Another reason why derailments might occur could be mechanical issues with the rail cars. And I think that's actually an interesting thing to bring up looking at this whole train derailment because even though this happened on Norfolk Southern's track and it was at Norfolk Southern train and the wayside detectors or the hot box detectors are owned and operated by Norfolk Southern. The rail cars themselves are actually not owned by Norfolk Southern. Oh, okay. Norfolk Southern like, you know, inspects the train to make sure, you know, everything looks okay. But in terms of who is actually liable for the rail car is kind of to be determined. Most rail cars are owned by either rail car leasing companies such as like Trinity Industries or GATX. And the other kind of rail car owner are actually companies or shippers as people call them. So, you know, they can be like your chemical manufacturers or your plastics producers or your grain producers or your coal companies. You know, so they can be the ones who actually own the rail car. Wow. That's so interesting because I think of just owning trains. I think of the trains as the cars and that is not the case. I mean, there was a point in time where the railroads did own the rail cars. It's not just that they don't own or they still do own some rail cars, but that transitioned for various reasons to shippers owning the rail cars. So, so how big or how powerful is the rail industry? You mentioned those unionized workers before. And I know when there was talk of a potential strike, people said like that could cost about $2 billion a day. How big is this industry? It is pretty significant because, you know, I mean, even though freight rail isn't the dominant transportation mode, it's still a very important transportation mode. That figure of $2 billion was floated around because you're not just talking about the railroads. You're talking about all the goods that are shipped via rail again. So you have the grain, you have your coal, you have your sneakers from places around the world. You have all these goods that their transport and their ability to get to power plants or to target might be affected. If there was a strike or if there's like a disruption in the rails. Joanna Marsh, thank you so much for joining us on the weeds. Thank you for having me. I really appreciate it. Joanna Marsh is a reporter for Freight Waves. So those are the basics of the railroad industry in America. Up next, the regulations guiding them. Support for this podcast comes from Burrow. So I recently moved into a new apartment and I have learned a couple of things about interior decorating because of it. The first is that under no circumstances can you rush a vibe. And the second is that just one great sofa or dresser can really make a difference in your entire place. Now, you may not think it's worth it because you know that getting a big piece of furniture home isn't always easy. But if you're a longtime listener to this podcast, then you already know that Burrow is a furniture brand that can take care of that for you. Burrow not only gets you your items fast, they also save you an average of $100 on large items with their free shipping. Their credences are perfect for your TV with adjustable height interior shelves and cord organizing holes at each corner. Everything is designed to work perfectly together in your living space. So all you gotta do is add it to your cart. Plus, Burrow's world-class support team is available whenever you need. Right now, you can get 10% off your first order at burrow.com.slashweeds. That's burrow. B-U-R-R-O-W.com.slashweeds. For 10% off your burrow purchase. Burrow.com.slashweeds. We're back. This is the weeds. And we're talking about trains today. I call up someone else to get into the regulatory aspect. I'm Ian Duncan and I'm a transportation reporter for the Washington Post. Historically, what has railroad regulation looked like in this country? The regulation of railroad goes back to the 19th century because obviously one of the oldest big industries in the country. There was a whole system of regulation that came in towards the end of the 19th century. And then the modern era, sort of starting in the 80s, has been about deregulation. And so that's where we get to today where there is federal oversight, but it's reasonably limited and a lot of it is to do with safety measures. So you mentioned that limited federal oversight. Let's talk about the current regulatory landscape. What role does the federal government have when it comes to the railroads right now? So there is a part of the U.S. Department of Transportation that's called the Federal Railroad Administration. And they have the power to set safety rules for the railroads. It's a little bit like what you might be more familiar with the FAA for planes, but they're not running the air traffic control system in the same way. So they're very much a regulator. They do do some hands-on stuff. They do some inspections, but it's mostly about setting safety rules. It seems like safety is the major aspect of regulation when it comes to trains and railroads. Are there any other aspects of regulation? There's a body called the Surface Transportation Board, which has some commercial oversight in terms of the relationships between railroads and their customers. And there was some kind of attention on that last year because there was a lot of attention about the service that railroads were providing to their customers, but it's fairly light touch regulation there. Why is it such a light touch? Why does the federal government have such little oversight? We've had an approach to regulating transportation in this country, really going back to the 70s and 80s. It used to be much more tightly controlled. And so in aviation and in railroads, you've seen deregulation, the idea being that with the railroads, they were like struggling financially. And so you had attempts to kind of free them up and help them turn into more viable business. And if you talk to the railroads, they would say this has been a period of real growth and financial success. And that's good for the country because they're providing this vital service to get goods where they need to go. So as of now, what are some of the regulation or rules that do exist? I'm thinking as far as safety, maintenance, workers, what are some of the things we see in place? So there are rules around inspection of tracks and standards for maintaining tracks and equipment on railroads. I think the big thing that's kind of coming to focus in the last decade or so and certainly in the last few weeks has been around how a special kind of train that's called a high hazardous flammable train is regulated. They've kind of come to be seen as particularly dangerous, full of chemicals that a potentially can burn or explode. And so there you have a system of rules like speed limits, breaking standards, kind of much more detailed regulation about what the railroads are required to do. Can you talk a little bit about the role of lobbying when it comes to railroads, railroad regulations, just the way things are working right now? It's a pretty consolidated industry. So that gives them a reasonable amount of power in Washington. They have an association that also represents them. And so what we've seen in this period where there's been interest in trying to set new safety standards is that the railroads will often lobby against that. Their argument is that it's a period of technological change in the industry and so that if you write rules right now, they might be outdated by the time that they're put in place. And so the Obama administration made some efforts to tighten the rules. But what you saw in the Trump administration was they were interested in deregulation really across the board. And especially when it came to transportation, they looked for opportunities to walk things back. The guy who ran the Federal Railroad Administration during the Trump administration was, had worked as a railroad executive, and he gave speeches basically, echoing the line of the industry. And so they found that they were able to get some rules rolled back. Other things that had the Obama administration, I think, maybe thought they would be leaving for a future Hillary Clinton administration and get finished were put on pause. And so they were pretty successful in getting their agenda advanced in that administration. I think the idea of the technology moving too quickly for regulation is really interesting. A couple weeks ago, we did an episode on Gonzales v. Google, which is this case that looks at the internet and section 230. And one of the themes we walked away with was this idea that it's difficult to regulate tech companies because the technology moves so fast. And I don't think I ever realized that that's the case when it comes to trains as well. Is the tech and everything really moving that quickly? An example of this where there's a dispute right now is that there's technology that can automatically check basically the health of tracks. And it's pretty new. And the industry thinks this is much better at finding potential problems of tracks that can lead to derailments or other kinds of accidents than human inspectors. And so they've been trying to get permission to walk back the number of visual inspections that they do and rely on this technology. And under the Biden administration, they have allowed some testing to go on. But what they've been saying since the derailment in East Pasadena is you can do both. You don't need to get rid of the human inspections, the visual inspections in order to use this technology. Let's do both and have a double knot set of eyes because one's not a literal eye. But two ways of looking at these things. But the industry, obviously, also has a commercial incentive to try and use technology that might be cheaper than having people do the work. Yeah, it seems like this seems like another iteration of this battle we see between technology and people being employed. And I often wonder why that tension is there because I just figure machines can only work as good as the people who make them or are utilizing them. In rail, there's a really clear example of this, which is these trains are huge, potentially miles long. And another one of the big disputes currently is how many people need to be on these trains. And the standard at the moment is two. An engineer who essentially drives the train and a conductor who's responsible for keeping tabs of what's on the train. And I think when I learned that, that was reasonably astonishing to me when you think of just the size of these vehicles, you see them like rumbling through your town or whatever, they're huge and there's two people on there. And there used to be more, there used to be five, but the unions that represent the workers on the railroads are worried that the railroads are looking to go down to just one person, just an engineer, and then maybe having someone following in a truck or on the ground. And so there's certainly the union's view is, as you said, that you kind of can't cut this bat that these machines do only work as well as the people, but the industry has seen it's been able to cut the crews before. And I think is interested in seeing if you can go even further. Real road worker unions have been very much in the news in the past few months. Can you talk about those unions and sort of how they're responding to this and that relationship? Back at the end of last year, these unions were in very, very tense contract negotiations. It's imperative that the companies and the unions stay at the table and try and get a deal so we can get that vote out there. At the end of the day, if we don't have a deal, one of these unions for some reason doesn't get to an agreement with the company, then the way that their railroad act works is Congress will have to take action. One of the big sticking points was around sick leave because of the way the railroads are regulated. The federal government was able to step in and try and negotiate a resolution to that. And they kind of did. They came up with a deal. It had some pay raises and some changes in working conditions, but it wasn't what all of the unions wanted. And so Congress had to step in and essentially force the unions to take a deal. And we have seen now this year that they're kind of privately coming to terms on sick leave with some railroads. But the unions basically, I think, look at this, this derailment in these past years and say, look, like we were warning you that we play an essential role in safety. And this is why safety really matters. There's real consequences here when one of these trains comes off the tracks. Next, we get into some of the policy proposals. And of course, the politics. This is the weeds and we're back with the Washington Post, Ian Duncan. So I want to look forward and think of where we go from here. What are some of the policy proposals and regulation proposals that were seeing emerge that could make railway safer. So there's a few things and we've seen movement on some of these already. The sick leave thing, you know, Secretary Buttigieg has cast that as a safety measure essentially if you have workers who are exhausted who are ill and can't take time off to get medical care that they're not going to be working safely. Like I said, some of the railroads have sort of made some steps towards offering leave. And then the other thing that happened is that there's a close call reporting system that's run by the government. And that is something that the government sees as a way for workers to kind of come forward and confidentially report safety risks without feeling like there's going to be reprisals. Some railroads had joined that, but the big freight railroads had resisted that. And the administration kind of came down pretty hard and said that we really want you to join this. And so they've all agreed that they'll do that. I think looking forward, the big dispute that was already playing out before this derailment was this question of crew sizes. The unions really want to get a floor set up to the kind of current standard. And there was some efforts to do that in the discussions around the bipartisan infrastructure law a couple of years ago. And the Biden administration proposed doing that as a regulation. There was a bill that was introduced after the derailment that includes that idea to. So that is definitely a big one. I think there's some questions about could we set standards for a type of technology that is along the tracks and is designed to detect problems on the train that have been implicated in this derailment that they are supposed to catch. In this case, bearings that are too hot on the trains. And they did, but too late. And so could we space them out differently. Could the thresholds at which they'd send a warning to the crew be be changed. And so there's interest in putting that into law as well. But other big thing that Secretary Buttigieg has called for this and it's in this legislation as well is just to increase the fines for when railroads break these violations they cap out around $200,000. And these are companies that make billions and billions of dollars. And so what Secretary Buttigieg has said is like that's just no deterrent to them. And so again, that legislation would also ramp up the maximum fines pretty dramatically potentially. You mentioned those wayside bearing detectors. But another piece of technology that's been talked about a lot is electronically controlled pneumatic breaks as well. Did that factor into this and kind of shed light on what those are for us. This was a huge dispute. It was really more of a political dispute than an actual dispute about this. It's so weird if thinking as like breaks being political. Yeah. And it gets back to this issue of the deregulation during the Trump administration. So the current emergency breaks have an air hose that's sort of connected between all the cars on a train. And so when it's tripped, it's like that air signal kind of pulses down the train. And so all the cars aren't sort of having their breaks applied at the same time. The electronic breaks would be designed to have this kind of immediate breaking on all the cars. And so the history has pretty tangled here. But basically the Obama administration wrote a rule and said they should be required on these high hazard, flammable trains. And Congress stepped in and said, you need to have another look at that. We're not convinced. And so under the Trump administration, they did some math to try and figure out what would be the cost to the railroads of installing these breaks and what would be the benefits in terms of preventing accidents. And they found that in their view, it didn't pencil out. So they repealed that requirement. The train that derailed in his pasting was not one of these high hazard trains. It didn't meet the definition. And so even had the rule been in place, it wouldn't have had these breaks on. And then there would have been a question about would they have helped stop it? Maybe they would have, but we just won't know. And so I think, I mean, often what happens is that these derailments and other transportation accidents, they are investigated by the National Transportation Safety Board, which is pretty thorough, but it's also not dripping out information immediately. And there was this kind of vacuum of information where lots of issues came up that maybe weren't totally opposite to what had happened here. But there is still interest in that technology. The industry was excited about it at first, but now says it doesn't work particularly well. It's not super reliable. But I think that there could be interest in trying to revive some rules around requiring that as well. So it's been about a month since the derailment, which, you know, what is time it flies. And recently there's been a flurry of announcements and regulatory proposals. We have the Railway Safety Act of 2023, but there's also talk of doing something along these hazmat railway routes. Can you talk about that a little bit? The head of this Federal Railroad Administration, he went back to East Palatine and they have a special truck that they posed in front of. But it uses this automated track inspection technology and they are going to go out. They're going to start in East Palatine and look at the routes, make sure kind of the physical infrastructure is up to snuff, but also make sure that all the rules are being followed. And I think that's just sort of an effort by the government to really make sure that the eyes are dotted and the teas are crossed, perhaps catch something. They do these kinds of inspections anyway, but they're saying this would be kind of a new focused program on routes where there might be a bit higher risk. Norfolk Southern CEO, Alan Shaw is set to appear before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. What will you be listening for during that testimony? I think it would be interesting to hear the tone and the sort of potentially the openness to making changes to the way that they run their business. I don't know if they will have kind of specific commitments. Like I said, they've joined this confidential reporting system. Initially, the industry's view was we can't rush to judgment here. We need to wait and let the NTSB do its work. The NTSB has kind of released at least some preliminary findings, and that gave people a lot more to kind of hold on to in terms of facts and potential lapses. And so that's why you started to see more of these proposals and advisories coming out from the government as they kind of drill down on specific issues. So, what will his position be? Will it be? I'm sure they will want to tout the safety record as they see it, but will they sort of signal that they're open to rethinking how they do things? What will they say about what their long-term commitment is going to be to this community and these past scenes because there's kind of two pieces to this story in a way that you have the rail safety piece, but then there's this whole other environmental side. And is this going to be a long process of remediation? And is this company going to stick with this community and how people out? I want to get into the politics a little bit. I think on one end, we're seeing bipartisan cooperation. I think of this bill being sponsored by JD Vance and Sherrod Brown. But on the other end, it is partisan. People have criticized the response by the Biden administration and the Department of Transportation's response. And former President Donald Trump, who's campaigning, made a stop there. How are we seeing these politics play out? Yeah, I mean, I said before that there were sort of two dimensions to this story, but maybe there's really three because the political dimension is really a whole kind of other aspect to this. And it's, I think it's surprised people who investigate transportation accidents for a living. Like the kind of lead guy in the office at the NTSB was like, normally these things will happen and there'll be a lot of attention on the first day. And then it will wane and then by a week later, nobody's talking about it. And this sort of opposite thing happened that it took a while for people to start paying attention. Partly that's because they had to do this controlled burn of this chemical vinyl chloride. And so then you started to have these images of just this huge plume of black smoke and it raised the kind of environmental state. So I think part of that was just because of the nature of this incident, but I think also it took on this political life. And a lot of that has been focused on Pete Buttigieg. And I think a big reason for that is that he is kind of an unusual person to be transportation secretary. Like, this is an office that they've faced. Air crashes and big disasters and things in the past, but it hasn't been led by someone who was so political and, you know, is presumed to sort of have continuing political ambitions. And so Republicans in Congress had already been looking for opportunities to criticize him, especially with air travel and winter was pretty messy. And so they tried to lay some of that at his door. Some of it, I think, reasonably so. And so he's just a kind of pretty ripe target. And so the question was like, where is he? Why hasn't he showed up? And so he did eventually go out there. Our personnel were on the ground within hours of this incident, but I do think that every rail incident calls the question on how we can strengthen the regulation of rail safety in this country. It is interesting to see this kind of to track political response because J.D. Vance and Marco Rubio, for example, have been some of the kind of loudest critics of Buttigieg over all of this. The Secretary of Transportation has been the recipient of hundreds of billions of dollars of infrastructure funding, and yet it looks in a lot of ways like our infrastructure is degrading or certainly not getting better. The second thing is yesterday, Pete Buttigieg had the opportunity to address this problem. He instead talked about the excessive amount of, this is not a joke, too many white men in the construction industry. That is not a serious concern for this country right now. What's going on in East Palestine is the Secretary of Transportation needs to focus on real problems, not fake problems. And until he does, people are going to wonder whether he's doing his job. And yet, there are sponsors of this legislation that does a lot of the things that he's also been calling for. So when you get down to specifics, there seems to be maybe some room for agreement. I think that will be another dimension to really watch at this hearing. Pursuing this as a political battle, how much are Democrats trying to defend the administration's response and how much is it about trying to find solutions and trying to find ways to help the community in these Palestinians. You get with these hearings, you get a chance to see the two approaches side by side, so we'll see how it plays out. Ian Duncan covers federal transportation agencies and the politics of transportation for the Washington Post. In the past month, I've been thinking a lot about train derailments. And while East Palestine is top of mine right now, there was another Norfolk Southern derailment in Ohio just this past weekend. There are lots of ideas and there's lots of attention being paid to trains right now. But it's really hard to say if any of these new initiatives could prevent another East Palestine. We'll just have to wait and see. That's all for us today. Thank you to Joanna Marsh and Ian Duncan for joining me. A special thank you to Benji Jones for his reporting. Our producer is Sophie Le Lond, Krishnayala engineered this episode. Elizabeth Crane and Kim Eggleston fact checked it. Our editorial director is A.M. Hall, and I'm your host, John Glenn Hill. The weeds is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. ♪♪♪♪