Rail & Labor News from RWU
| | Weekly Digest Number 12 - March 24, 2026 | | Welcome to the RWU Rail & Labor News! This news bulletin is produced and emailed out each Tuesday morning. We hope you find each week's news and information useful. If so, please share with co-workers, friends, and colleagues. If you like, you can sign them up to get all the news from RWU HERE. Or forward them the link. Got a hot tip? Please forward the article and a link to raillabornews@gmail.com. Note: If you read over this news bulletin each week, you will be sure to never miss the important news of what is going on in the railroad world from a worker's perspective! | | THIS WEEK'S RAIL AND LABOR NEWS | | Editor's Note: Public works are not favors handed down at convenience; they are obligations, paid for in advance by the people who build and sustain this country. When funds promised for rail infrastructure are withheld after the work is done, it is not thrift, it is breach. The consequences are not abstract. They land on working men and women, on projects stalled mid-stride, and on communities left waiting for capacity they were already promised. Rail is not a line item to be toggled on and off. It is a public trust, and when that trust is broken, labor and the public alike are made to carry the cost. | |
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Progressive Railroading / March 18th
The Metropolitan Transportation Authority yesterday sued the Trump administration, accusing it of withholding $58.6 million in federal reimbursements for the MTA's Second Avenue Subway project in New York City.
The MTA filed the breach-of-contract complaint in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims, arguing that the federal government has failed to pay for work already completed under a federal grant tied to the project, Politico reported.
The lawsuit marks the second time the MTA and New York Gov. Kathy Hochul have been involved in legal action against the Trump administration for holding up federal funding for transportation projects. Last month, construction on the $16 billion Hudson River rail tunnel project was paused after the Trump administration in October 2025 ordered a freeze on reimbursements related to previously awarded federal grants and loans.
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| Editor's Note: There is a difference between ambition and proof, and the Board is right to insist on the latter. The last wave of mergers promised efficiency and delivered instability, and the people who paid for that lesson were the ones moving the trains. A transcontinental system cannot be built on projections alone while the underlying network is already strained. If the carriers believe in this plan, they can show.. clearly and completely.. how service, safety, and labor stability improve under it. Until then, skepticism is not obstruction. It is memory doing its job. | |
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Trains Magazine / March 19th
While Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern prepare to file a revised merger application in late April, federal regulators are requesting specific data related to their proposal to create the first U.S. transcontinental railroad.
The request for documents to be submitted prior to the revised application likely could include highly sensitive data related to the $85 billion deal — the first to be evaluated under more stringent rules enacted in 2001 after mergers in the 1990s led to serious rail service meltdowns.
The request included in a seven-page decision released Wednesday, March 18, follows a March 3 letter to the STB from the Department of Justice saying such documents are of “critical importance” and reflect real-time business decisions and forecasts concerning the merging companies’ operations, and forecasts of future market conditions.
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| Editor's Note: It appears that this could only happen because some railroad's operating rules - not all - allow to shove "back one train length to pick up the conductor." And this on a mainline! Without point protection! Ironically, numerous trainmen have been fired in recent months because they were observed taking their eyes off of the shove, while protecting the point, on other than main track. This glaring contradiction and hypocrisy is staggering. | |
Trains Magazine / March 18th
A Canadian National train making a shove move backed into Amtrak’s City of New Orleans, then backed up and hit the passenger train a second time, the National Transportation Safety Board said in its preliminary report on the Feb. 22, 2026, collision near Memphis.
The incident at about 11 a.m. led to minor injuries to two Amtrak employees and two passengers among the seven crew members and 118 passengers on board [see “Passengers injured in low-speed collision …,” Trains.com, Feb. 22, 2026].
The CN train, referred to as an Illinois Central train in the report, was traveling about 10 mph at the time of the initial collision. Crew members on the CN train told NTSB investigators that they believed that collision was resistance from an air brake problem, so they pulled forward and reversed again, striking the City of New Orleans a second time at lower speed about three minutes after the initial collision.
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| Editor's Note: They call it fear of competition, as if memory were a weakness instead of a safeguard. The last great consolidations were sold with the same language of progress, and they left behind congestion, service failures, and a workforce stretched thin to absorb the consequences. A system this essential cannot be handed over to greater concentration on the promise that it will behave better this time. Rail is not a private game of scale; it is a public artery, sustained by labor and relied upon by the nation. When risk is shifted onto the network and the people who run it, skepticism is not self-interest. It is responsibility. | |
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Trains Magazine / March 10th
Over the last several months, the Class I railroads not named Union Pacific or Norfolk Southern have been accused of opposing the largest, most unnecessary proposed rail merger ever attempted because those railroads are afraid to compete or are selfishly afraid it will hurt their business. Those railroads are unwilling to look forward and get over the past, we’ve been told.
The simple fact is that a merger of this magnitude brings unnecessary risk to the U.S. rail network. It creates a Goliath with unprecedented market power in the hands of a company that already has an established, long history of uncompetitive behavior. Certainly, CPKC, the railway which I have the honor of leading, will advocate for its interests and, in the end, be strong and successful, regardless of merger approval or rejection.
But one railway’s interests aren’t what’s at issue here. That’s the whole point.
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| Editor's Note: Union Pacific loves to tout this line: "We made a historic pledge: Every union employee who has a job at the time of the UP-NS merger will continue to have one." They say that they promise this to ALL union workers. Then they have the unmitigated audacity - without batting an eyelash - to state that ... Well, it is just a pledge, it is just our word ... unless your union agrees to publicly support the proposed merger, then we will put it in writing. What they are in effect admitting with this curious contradiction is that some employees are more protected than others, and their "promise" does not mean shit. | | The Orwellian double-speak of Union Pacific's "jobs guarantee", as demonstrated by the X post below. | |
ProPublica / March 18th
The $16 billion Hudson Tunnel Project, under construction between Manhattan and New Jersey, will improve passenger rail service, an important issue for New York City commuters. It would seem to have nothing to do with what’s happening in northern Wisconsin.
But after the White House froze federal grant funding for the project in the fall, citing concerns about diversity and equity measures, lobbyists with an interest in the tunnel donated $2,500 to a political novice running in the Republican primary in Wisconsin’s 7th Congressional District.
The young candidate, Michael Alfonso, has no sway over the matter. However, his father-in-law does: Sean Duffy is secretary of the U.S. Department of Transportation.
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Legendary Locomotives / March 18th
| | Editor's Note: That makes two Amtrak vs truck incidents in the past 4 days on New Orleans bound passenger trains. While ostensibly these collisions - that sometimes result in derailment and death - are not considered the fault of the railroad but rather bad motorists, we need to look at the infrastructure itself. Compared to Europe for example, the US has tens of thousands of crossings at grade, many of them very lightly protected. And those equipped with lights and gates are far from safe. If some of the mega profits were plowed back into better protection - or crossing elimination altogether through grade seperation - we would see far fewer incidents like this catastrophe in 2022 or this one in 2011. | |
Trains Magazine / March 20th
No passenger injuries were reported but three crew members received “precautionary medical evaluations” after a grade-crossing collision between Amtrak’s City of New Orleans and a tractor-trailer rig in Jackson.
The incident involving the train from Chicago to New Orleans occurred about 12:12 p.m. today (Friday, March 20), Amtrak said in a statement to the Mississippi Clarion-Ledger. The train had departed from the station in Jackson at 12:05 p.m. Approximately 241 passengers and crew members were on board. Jackson Police Department Public Information Officer Tommie Brown told the newspaper that the train hit the rear of the trailer. The driver was not injured.
The Amtrak Alerts social media feed reports that as of 4:35 p.m. CT and after a mechanical assessment, the train was canceled between Jackson and New Orleans, with bus transportation provided for the remainder of the trip. Amtrak’s website currently shows Saturday’s northbound train as making its normal 1:45 p.m. departure from New Orleans; passengers should confirm that information closer to departure time.
| | Editor's Note: Brightline has shown the most promise of any privately funded passenger rail development in decades. And - not surprisingly - it is going under. It's like trying to privately finance a highway and expect a profit. There are fast, safe, frequent, punctual, convenient and very comfortable passenger train services all over the world - built on publicly funded infrastructure and development. It is unfortunate that the USA cannot come to terms with this reality and get on with building a proper, modern, publicly funded passenger rail network, one that is in such demand in this country right now. | | Editor's Note: Tesla is ramping up semi-truck production adjacent to the gigafactory in Sparks, so traffic will only worsen. Train service cold start relatively quickly and if construed as an employee shuttle instead of public transit could avoid hurdles. | |
KTVN / March 20th
The Regional Transportation Commission of Washoe County is looking into using the existing Union Pacific rail system between Reno, Sparks, and the Tahoe Reno Industrial Center to get workers out to USA Parkway.
The proposed rail project would run on the tracks from the Reno Amtrak station out to the TRI center.
For years, travelers have complained about the traffic getting out to USA Parkway.
The Nevada Department of Transportation has a plan to widen the freeway, but that project is not expected to be completed until 2031.
It’s the only project to be approved at the moment, while there are several other proposals that are being talked about.
| | NEWS FROM AROUND THE LABOR MOVEMENT | | Each week, RWU includes a few articles about advances and developments in the larger labor movement that are of interest to railroad workers. Got an artcile to submit for possible inclusion next week? Email it along to raillabornews@gmail.com. Thank you! | |
The Nation / March 10th
When you apply for a job as an “associate” at an Amazon warehouse, you don’t have to attach a résumé or supply references. All you have to provide is your name and your Social Security number, and the automated hiring system conducts a basic background check within minutes. If you clear that, congratulations—you got the job! Next you’re invited to a “hiring appointment” at a nondescript office building, where you shuffle into a line with dozens of other new hires, surrounded by banners in Amazon’s signature blue emblazoned with the company’s “Leadership Principles”: “Bias for Action,” “Learn and Be Curious,” “Customer Obsession.” You are photographed, drug-tested, and told, verbally, what your start date and schedule will be.
At no point are you asked, “Why do you want to work here?” When I went through these steps in the fall of 2022, my answer would have been “I want to build a union at Amazon.” I was a “salt,” a worker who gets a job in order to organize their workplace. Salting is a long-standing tactic of labor activists who seek to spark organizing from the shop floor. The origins of the term are debated—some say it connotes pouring salt in the wounds of capitalism to aggravate its contradictions. It could also derive from “salting a mine” to extract its valuable minerals (in this case, the collective potential of workers).
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Jacobin / March 12th
The Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee (EWOC) started about six years ago at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic as a way to help nonunion workers fight for safety improvements on the job. It has been successful, with over 8,000 workers reaching out to EWOC for support in developing organizing campaigns.
EWOC has worked with hundreds of these campaigns before handing them off to unions to continue. Those cases typically try for a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) union election, with the ultimate goal of bargaining a contract; in other cases, workers organize for wins but don’t have the goal of an election and a contract. We have worked to better understand the latter campaigns, which we have come to call “premajority unionism.”
Some workers choose to organize this way because the traditional path is impossible or unrealistic — like public sector workers in states without collective bargaining rights, where winning a union election and contract is not legally possible.
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Friday's Labor Folklore / March 20th
I make videos of songs and stories that portray the history and culture of working-class people. I love a good labor and protest song! You can watch these videos by visiting my YouTube channel. Click here or type "Saul Schniderman channel" in the YouTube search box.
| | WEEKLY DERAILMENT DEPARTMENT | | Each Tuesday in this news bulletin, RWU does our best to present a picture of what has been happening over the course of the previous week in terms of derailments in North America, and investigation determinations of previous accidents. NOTE: This list is by no means comprehensive. Smaller and less consequential mishaps are generally not reported here. If the wreck results in injury or fatality, or is especially damaging/extreme, a full article will appear as a feature in the dozen or so rail articles above. Know of a train wreck? Please feel free to forward a link to raillabornews@gmail.com for possible inclusion next week. Thanks! |
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