Title: Freight Railroads and Crew Size | Association of American Railroads
Headings: Freight Rail & Crew Size Regulations
Policy
Freight Rail & Crew Size Regulations
Crew size is not a safety issue.
Collective bargaining maintains safety while allowing railroads to modernize their workforce.
Railroads must be able to innovate and compete.

Content: Freight Railroads and Crew Size | Association of American Railroads
Policy
Freight Rail & Crew Size Regulations
Freight Rail Policy Stance: Lawmakers should not legislatively mandate two-person crew sizes, such as called for in the Safe Freight Act of 2019. These efforts would upend decades of meaningful collective bargaining and undermine the industry’s ability to compete in a rapidly changing transportation space. DOWNLOAD FACT SHEET
Crew staffing — particularly the number of persons in the locomotive — has always been established through collective bargaining, a longstanding process used by railroads and rail labor to negotiate wages, benefits and work rules, not by legislation. Current legislative efforts to require at least two-person crews lack a safety justification; ignore the safe and successful use of single-person crews that have happened for decades at some U.S. freight railroads and in passenger and freight rail systems throughout the world; upend decades of meaningful collective bargaining between rail management and rail labor; and undermine the sector’s ability to compete against less climate friendly forms of transportation. After five years of analysis, The Federal Railroad Administration (FRA), the nation’s the expert federal regulatory agency that Congress has vested authority in establish national standards in every area of railroad safety, has evaluated this issue in the past and has never regulated train crew size. The FRA even went as far to rescind a proposal requiring two people in the cab of a locomotive, concluding that federal crew size regulation is unnecessary.