Railroading Congress

Last fall, a school bus crash at a rail crossing in Fox RiverGrove killed seven teenagers and injured 29.

Unfortunately, this horrific accident was not extraordinary.There is a train accident every 24 minutes in the United States.These range from the 1993 commuter train disaster in Gary, Ind.,which killed seven people and the crash in Maryland earlier this yearwhich killed 11, to vehicle collisions, pedestrian deaths,derailments and toxic spills.

Yet, implausibly, rail industry lobbyists are trying to railroada law through Congress to let them off the hook for negligence andrecklessness. The Amtrak Reauthorization Act (HR 1788), which hasalready passed the House and is pending in the Senate, would weakensafety incentives by arbitrarily capping verdicts involving railroadaccidents.

To add insult to injury, this law would single out victims justlike those who died in Fox River Grove by specifically cappingnon-economic damages, which are not based on wages or medicalexpenses. This makes the lives of children, homemakers and retireesless valuable than the lives of wage-earners on the very same train.

This bill would also arbitrarily limit punitive damages,regardless of a rail line's misconduct, to $250,000 or three timesthe "economic" loss, whichever is greater. And it will leave Amtrak,commuter and freight rails with less incentive to use safety devices,observe limits or train and supervise employees.

Ironically, this bill to protect railways comes at a time whenthe railroad giants are in the midst of merger mania. The UnionPacific has so much to spend that it has already gobbled up theChicago and North Western and is about to swallow others.

At the same time, the railroad industry is undergoing vasttechnological changes.

A train passing through a Chicago neighborhood may rely uponsignals from a dispatcher in Nebraska to tell it where and when tostop or go. Rail cars carry even greater volumes of hazardousmaterials.

Strict liability laws can help ensure that safety is a priority,not an afterthought. If railroads continue to be held responsiblefor all their passengers, not just those with more "economic" value,they will better serve the public, including pedestrians and vehiclescrossing their rails.

Illinois again illustrates the importance of holding railwaysaccountable. A spate of state legislative proposals to improve railsafety surfaced in the wake of the Fox River Grove accident. Butnone was enacted, because of weakened liability laws in Illinois.Limits on jury verdicts passed by our Republican State Legislature in1995 made it all too easy to ignore safety and let wrongdoers off thehook. It would be a fatal error to sanction such negligence.

Nancy A. Cowles is executive director of the Coalition forConsumer Rights and Robert B. Creamer is executive director forCitizen Action of Illinois.