If you’ve been penalized for reporting an on-the-job injury or safety hazard you are covered by the whistleblower amendments to the Federal Railroad Safety Act.

This week’s deadly car and Metro North train accident in New York shined a light on the danger drivers, passengers and railroad workers face at crossings.

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.

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

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.

Those mundane but endless black tanker cars rumbling through cities and suburbs alike are cloaking a volatile offender: crude oil.

In this post we'll explore the transport of the dangerous fuel behind some recent hazmat spills and how it affects railroad worker safety.

This month an executive from the Ohio Oil and Natural Gas Association was quoted in an Ohio paper saying that the oil shipped through towns and cities all over the US is “ very volatile” and “basically liquified natural gas."

The official went onto say, “It is still classified as crude oil, even thought it is a lot closer to gasoline.”  

This is true for Bakken crude, coming out of the Bakken Oil shale in North Dakota, which regulators have concluded is more flammable than regular crude.

Technically classified as crude oil, and thus handled according to a certain set of federal safety guidelines overseen by Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, crude by rail (CBR) has picked up speed. For example in eastern Ohio alone, CBR shipments are up over 23%. But with tanker car derailments, like last year's accident in Alabama, getting more attention, public concern is starting to rise as well.

Dirty cars and poor communication are some of commuters’ biggest complaints about the railroad, and they’ve got ample evidence to prove their case.

But what conductors and cleaners and crews know is, the problems started long before they got on the job and without some changes at the top, aren’t likely to go away. And in the meantime it’s the conductors and the commuters, both power less, who are squared off.

The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) has issued its wish list for passenger and worker safety. If you are a railroad that doesn’t want to invest in safety, it's more like a hit list. 

Every year for the last 23 years the federal agency has highlighted what it sees as the trending problems in transportation, and every year the railroad safety problems and the industry’s failure to address them, makes the list. You can see the complete NTSB list here. This year, half of them involve railroad transportation.