EAST PALESTINE — Two days of National Transportation Safety Board hearings in East Palestine brought bombshell testimony about Norfolk Southern’s procedures before the derailment.

Jason Cox of the Transportation Communications Union testified that a “firewall of safety has been severely compromised.”

He reported during the hearing that the 23rd rail car of the train — the one that overheated and likely caused the Feb. 3 derailment — did not undergo an inspection from Norfolk Southern, using what officials referred to as “ghost tracks.” The term is used to describe trains that do not stop in rail yards to circumvent inspection. It is much like a semi truck that fails to stop at weigh stations on the highway.

On top of “ghost tracking,” Cox said that Norfolk Southern has reduced the time inspectors are allotted to inspect the cars, having reduced that time from three minutes per car to just one minute.

The catalyst car was picked up in Madison, Illinois, and not inspected. It then traveled through yards in Toledo, Cleveland and Bellevue, and still no defect in the wheel bearing was identified.

“There are qualified mechanical inspectors at all these points, but they would not have been allowed to look at that car, per the Norfolk Southern policy,” Cox said.

VISUAL DISCOVERY

Norfolk Southern countered that a visual inspection would not have discovered the defect. Jared Hopewell, the railroad’s assistant vice president of communications and signals, also testified that no written policy existed when it came to the time given for inspections.

NTSB chair Jennifer Homendy then produced a Norfolk Southern field card that noted inspection time as well as an email from a carman foreman that called for speedy inspections.

Cox argued against the claim that the defect could have not been discovered visually. The NTSB reported that 20 of the cars on the train were determined to have defects and, according to Cox, all were seen by the naked eye after the derailment.

“It’s my understanding that those defects were found visually by the Federal Railroad Administration after the disaster,” he testified.

HOT BOX

The NTSB also focused on the wayside detectors that failed to sound an alarm that the bearing had exceeded ambient temperature in time to prevent the derailment.

Wayside hot-box detectors are placed on rail tracks every 20 miles, give or take. The detectors record the temperatures of railroad bearings as trains pass by using infrared sensors. If an overheated bearing, one that reads a certain degree over ambient temperature, is detected an alarm is triggered and the crew is notified of a potential failure. The crew then stops and inspects the train.

The safety system, however, didn’t prevent the train from derailing in East Palestine. By that time, the crew was alerted the wheel bearing was more than 250 degrees above the ambient temperature.

The train passed through three hot-box detectors stationed outside of East Palestine. The first detector registered a temperature of 38 degrees above the ambient temperature. Eleven miles later, the second detector indicated that the bearing had overheated to 103 degrees above the ambient temperature. Nineteen more miles down the track, the bearing had rocketed to 253 degrees above ambient temperature.

It was only after the third reading that the alarm sounded and the crew notified, but the current system requires the entire train to pass through before an alert is sent. The train that derailed was 150 cars and 1.75 miles long.

It was also learned during the hearing that alert temperature thresholds are set by the railroads and are not mandated through any legislation.

WHEEL BEARINGS

As for the integrity of wheel bearings, the components’ lifespan is measured through many factors. The estimated time of service for a wheel bearing is estimated at 2 million miles, but actual miles are not tracked.

The date the component was installed and the miles that car averages a month is the current formula that determines bearing health and idle time can also impact a wheeling bearing integrity.

Wheel bearing expert Constantine Tarawneh, a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley’s Transportation Center for Railway Safety, testified that grease in a wheel bearing can separate or leak when the bearing is not in use. The wheel bearing that is suspected to have instigated the derailment had sat dormant two times for periods of six months or longer.

Bearing-related derailments are rare and have been reduced drastically in large part to the wayside-detection system, Mike Rush of the Association of American Railroads, testified, but Tarawneh called that system “inefficient” and insisted better technology is available and should be implemented. The current system identifies only bearings that are about to or have already failed. Proactive measures are necessary, he said.

“I think it’s time for us to think of different ways to be able to track and detect the onset of bearing failure,” Tarawheh testified. “Right now, we have access to machine learning, artificial intelligence and modeling that can predict bearing failure before it happens.”