Safety

FRA's Office of Safety promotes and regulates safety throughout the Nation's railroad industry. We employ more than 415 Federal safety inspectors, who operate out of eight regional offices nationally. Our inspectors specialize in the following five safety disciplines and promote numerous grade crossing and trespass-prevention initiatives:

Hazardous Materials
Motive Power and Equipment
Operating Practices
Signal and Train Control
Track
Highway-Rail Grade Crossing and Trespassing Prevention Programs

Additionally, we train and certify State safety inspectors to enforce Federal rail safety regulations. Today, the State Rail Safety Participation Program consists of 30 States employing 160 safety inspectors in the five rail safety disciplines.

By law, we are responsible for promoting railroad safety nationwide and enforcing safety standards. Our inspectors conduct site-specific safety inspections of railroads and monitor their compliance with federally mandated safety standards. Complementing this traditional approach to safety, we have created a comprehensive program in which participants work with FRA to identify and correct the root causes of problems across an entire railroad system. This Safety Assurance and Compliance Program emphasizes a safety-partnership approach to systemic problems, but it does not sacrifice enforcement tools, if necessary.

We also manage a substantial regulatory agenda, which includes items derived from Congressional mandates, as well as FRA's own ideas, and issues raised by various partners in the railroad community. To ensure that regulations meet safety needs while providing flexibility to choose the means of implementation, we established the Railroad Safety Advisory Committee. The RSAC is a collaborative effort that provides us with consensus recommendations from the industry on a range of regulatory issues. 

Central to the success of our rail safety effort is the ability to understand the nature of rail-related accidents and to analyze trends in railroad safety. To do this, we collect rail accident/incident data from the railroads and convert this information into meaningful statistical tables, charts, and reports.