Will increasing pay for rail safety inspectors help?
Rail safety reform is not a matter of partisan politics — or it shouldn’t be, anyway. But since February 2023, when a derailment in East Palestine ignited renewed calls for reform, politicians in Washington, D.C., have sat on their hands while their friends in the railroad industry made promises and assurances that weren’t worth the paper their public relations teams hoped it would be printed on. This week, U.S. Sens. Jim Justice, R-W.Va., and Gary Peters, D-Mich., are giving it another shot, with a bill that would increase pay for federal railroad inspectors and ...