How long do I have to file my case? Am I too late to file a claim with OSHA? Does my initial charge letter and the denial of my appeal give me different filing dates?

Every week I get these questions from railroad workers looking to sue their carrier. So here are not only the answers, but also a calculator so you can figure it out for yourself.

First, your injury claim must be filed within three years of when you knew or should have known that you had a work-related injury. In most instances, that means the date you got hurt. But there are other times where the beginning date might get fuzzy.

You probably know that your carrier pays workers that were injured on the job as a result of the carrier’s negligence. But what if the accident or injury was a little bit your fault?

Today we’ll explore why workers can still recover for their injuries, even when their own action was partly to blame.

If you’ve been following the blog, you know that as soon as you get hurt at work, the company springs to life to mitigate your claim, and may even do some tricky things behind your back.

You knew when you signed up for a career on the rails that the job working around 30+ ton cars was dangerous. And after a few years on the job, you might even consider yourself prepared for the less obvious dangers like track debris and unstable ground. In our last blog we covered 8 More Absurdly Common Railroad Safety Hazards featuring dangers like columns under dark bridges lacking reflective material.

Today we’re going to cover another danger – an attacker – and how the law can protect workers

This popped up in the news recently when a passenger reportedly pulled a knife on a NJ Transit conductor. Thankfully the incident didn’t result in injuries, but the dangers train workers face from the public is real, and not new.  (Railroad Worker's United keeps track of railroaders killed in the line of duty, which you can see here.) I represented another conductor a few years ago on NJT, also North Jersey Coast Line, who was jumped by a passenger.  In all cases, it's the carrier’s responsibility to provide reasonable protection against dangers of which it knew or should have known.

In my last blog about the everyday dangers railroad workers face on the job, I shared nine photos of on-the-job hazards that led to injuries for my clients. Unfortunately for employees, it wasn't hard to dig up a bunch more.

Each of these photos represents a failure by the railroad to ensure a safe work environment for its workers. That's eight instances where a carrier negligence violated FELA, the law that protects rail workers.

See if you can spot the safety hazards in each of these pictures. I bet you encountered some of them on your last shift.

All photos by Marc Wietzke

Whether an injured worker suing the railroad for negligence or a whistleblower suing the company for retaliation after reporting a safety hazard, my clients always ask, “Should I settle?” There is no hard and fast formula when facing a legal battle. There’s a balance of risk and reward involved in every case. The key to any battle, of course, is knowing when to accept the other side's surrender.

In this post I’ll answer some of the commonly asked questions about settling versus holding out for a jury verdict, to help you understand the best course of action for you.

Next to “How much is my case worth?” questions about the timing and duration of lawsuits are the ones I hear most often from railroad workers.

Timing is critical to lawsuits. If they’re going to protect their rights, workers need to know the window in which they have to report an injury, file an FELA suit or file a whistleblower claim.

This blog will answer those questions along with tougher, more, it-depends-on-your-situation queries like, “When will I get paid?” and “How long will my trial last?”

Read on for 10 answers to the most often asked timing-related questions about FELA injury and whistleblower claims.

1. How long do I have to report an injury?

Have you been on the railroad over five years?

Then you are most likely numb. Not from winter weather in early November, but to the railroad safety hazards around you daily.  That is both dangerous and avoidable.

Becoming desensitized to the dangers of train work makes you take unnecessary risks. Instead of voicing a concern, and possibly incurring the wrath of a general foreman, you shrug it off as something you've done hundreds of times before without incident. But if nine out of 10 people walk across the thin ice without falling through, and only the last does, does that mean the ice was safe? Of course not. It means the first nine got lucky. And so it is with you.

In this post we'll use photos to highlight common safety hazards workers face everyday.

Should I tell my lawyer?

The attorney-client relationship is a special one. Your railroad attorney is one of those people who needs to know your dark secrets and embarrassing history. (Like a doctor, your lawyer is required to keep it private.) Only by knowing what can be used against you, can your lawyer protect against the bias that such information can bring with it.

For example, I've had the railroad try and smear my client at trial by asking irrelevant questions about a DUI conviction from years before the accident. Because my client had already told me the details, I was able to show the jury just how ridiculous it was for the railroad to be bringing it up a trial.

In this post I’ll give you two examples of how being open and honest with me helped some of my past clients succeed in court, and one example where what the client kept from me meant a lawsuit doomed from the start.