Rail & Labor News from RWU
| | Weekly Digest Number 14 - April 7, 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: Brightline came to court with a simple theory.. that it could enjoy the benefits of a railroad while escaping the obligations that have governed rail labor for nearly a century. A federal judge rejected that premise outright, affirming that workers do not lose their rights simply because a company prefers a different label. When the people who move the trains choose representation, the law is not an obstacle to be engineered around, it is the foundation of fair dealing in this industry. This ruling is a reminder that labor rights are not optional, and they do not bend to corporate convenience. If Brightline wishes to be treated as a railroad in profit, it will be treated as one in principle. | |
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Progressive Railroading / April 2nd
A federal judge in the U.S. District Court of Southern Florida on Tuesday dismissed a lawsuit filed by passenger railroad Brightline against the National Mediation Board (NMB). The suit sought to invalidate a vote by the railroad's workers to join the Transportation Workers Union of America (TWU).
Brightline filed the lawsuit in December 2024, arguing that the company is not a rail carrier subject to the Railway Labor Act and that the NMB lacked jurisdiction to conduct a TWU election in January 2025.
Judge Darrin Gayles determined that the railroad's interpretation of the law was inaccurate and granted summary judgement to the NMB. TWU also joined the case against Brightline.
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| Editor's Note: A nation reveals its priorities not in speeches, but in ledgers. Here, we are told to accept less for the trains that bind communities together, while vast sums are found without hesitation elsewhere. The result is familiar.. deferred maintenance, diminished service, and workers asked to carry more with less. Passenger rail is not a luxury to be trimmed at convenience; it is a public good that sustains mobility, commerce, and dignity across regions too often overlooked. If we can afford ambition in one column, we can afford commitment in another. | |
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Trains Magazine / April 4th
The Trump administration has proposed significant reductions in funding for Amtrak and for transit capital projects under its budget request for fiscal 2027, released Friday, April 3.
The budget proposal calls for $1.44 billion in grants for Amtrak’s National Network, down from $1.57 billion for 2026, and $641 million for the Northeast Corridor, down from $841 million. The total of $2.081 billion would represent a 13.5% decrease.
Domestic cuts are widespread throughout the budget proposal, which calls for $1.5 trillion in defense spending, a 42% increase from 2026, while cutting $73 billion, or 10%, elsewhere.
The cut to Amtrak is far more significant when including Amtrak funding under the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021, which expires this year.
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| Editor's Note: This certainly is an interesting development that makes one wonder just what is going on. The union ATDA had previously issued a statement of opposition in December 2025, prior to the merger application being submitted. Note that UP dispatchers are not union, and therefore are not party to this agreement. This only concerns NS dispatchers based now in Atlanta. With the consolidation of dispatching facilities in recent decades, ATDA had every reason to fear that their members' jobs in Atlanta would not last. Now, the union's officials have settled for five years. That might please the members who will be gone by then, or the low senior members who are young and will simply move on rather than move 1500 miles to Omaha. But what about all those - the majority - with 5 to 25 years? Will the members get to vote on this? | |
Trains Magazine / April 2nd
Union Pacific and the American Train Dispatchers Association have announced an agreement that the railroad says will guarantee jobs for life for members of the union if the Union Pacific-Norfolk Southern merger is completed.
The agreement will cover those employed when the merger takes effect, subject to the usual requirements for continued employment.
ATDA President L. Ed McDowell said in a press release that he now supports the merger, in light of UP “guaranteeing our members work as ATDA Train Dispatchers for life, committing to the preservation of their right to their union work, and collaborating with us to maintain their stability.”
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| Editor's Note: It should not require uncommon courage to say that the nation ought to maintain what it has already begun. Yet here are 116 members, from both parties, reminding Congress that rail investment is not excess, but obligation.. to finish what was promised and to keep the system safe and whole. The work underway is not abstract; it is track, equipment, and people depending on continuity, not interruption. To withdraw now would not be prudence, it would be waste disguised as restraint. A country that starts what it will not sustain teaches its workers exactly how little its word is worth. | |
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Trains Magazine / March 30th
Some 116 members of the House of Representatives — more than a quarter of its membership — have made a bipartisan request to leaders of a House Appropriations subcommittee to provide full funding for Amtrak and other rail programs in fiscal 2027.
The March 27 letter, led by U.S. Reps. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.), Sarah McBride (D-Del.), Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.), and Don Bacon (R-Neb.), asks Appropriations Subcommiteee on Transportation, Housing, and Urban Development Chairman Steve Womack (R-Ark.) and Ranking Member James Clyburn (D-S.C.) to maintain funding for five programs to at least the level authorized under the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021, which expires in September.
“We acknowledge that this year’s spending decisions are difficult,” the letter reads. “However … we emphasize the importance of providing funding at least at the level authorized by the IIJA to continue the state-of-good repair and expansion projects that are underway and expand critically needed safety programs.”
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| Editor's Note: When the largest railroads run to court to block two-person crews, basic detection, and the right to inspect for hazards, they are not defending safety, they are defending control. The claim of federal preemption has too often been used as a shield against the very standards that prevent predictable failure. What New Jersey has done is not radical; it is a modest assertion that the public and the workforce have a stake in how risk is managed. If the industry believes its current practices are sufficient, it should welcome scrutiny, not fear it. A system that resists oversight is a system that has already said too much about itself. | |
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AJOT / March 31st
A trade group representing the largest U.S. railroads sued New Jersey on Monday, seeking to block a new law that it said imposes "severe restrictions" and unconstitutionally intrudes on federal government authority over railroad safety.
The complaint filed in the Trenton, New Jersey federal court by the Association of American Railroads challenged Senate Bill 3389, signed into law by Democratic former Governor Phil Murphy shortly before he left office in January.
Railroads challenged five provisions, including requiring that trains carrying hazardous materials have two-person crews, and creating a state-administered "wayside detector" program to monitor wheels, railcars and track. Another provision lets labor representatives inspect railroad property for possible hazards.
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| Editor's Note: Amtrak's equipment failure woes can be attributed to the failure of the U.S. government support, that has failed to keep existing equipment in a state of good repair and to place orders for new modern rolling stock in a timely fashion. The Carter administration oversaw the elimination of 5 routes, and the Clinton administration advocated for a few more eliminations. One can imagine just how successful these routes - all between major city pairs - would be today! Even worse, both Bush and Trump administrations advocated for the outright destruction of Amtrak altogether. so it is no wonder with enemies like these spanning half a century, the trains have problems. | |
Trains Magazine / March 30th
At a time when travelers may be searching for alternatives to flying, given massive airport security lines, Amtrak passengers continue to experience their own significant disruptions. Problems include host railroad congestion; hours-long delays resulting from grade crossing collisions; and numerous locomotive failures.
Although most trains across Amtrak’s network operate reliably, some routes have suffered repeated interruptions.
For instance, on Saturday, March 21, Lincoln Service train no. 302’s Charger locomotive lost power shortly following the train’s slightly delayed departure from St. Louis at 6:42 a.m. The stranded train was “rescued” three hours later by the Texas Eagle. The lengthy consist lost time making multiple stops at every station to Chicago, where it arrived at 4:33 p.m. That was two hours, 44 minutes late for Eagle passengers; No. 302’s patrons were close to five hours late.
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AZ Family / April 1st
A roadway was closed for about ten hours while crews worked to remove a boxcar that became separated from a train in Tempe late Tuesday morning.
Numerous firefighters and hazmat crews responded to the incident in the area of College Avenue and Encanto Drive around 10:30 a.m.
Tempe police say the train appears to have collided with itself, causing a boxcar to detach. There was no derailment.
Tempe Fire Medical Rescue is working with Union Pacific staff to assess the situation. They have since determined that no hazardous materials were involved.
| | Editor's Note: Deregulation was sold as rescue, but it remade the railroad into something narrower, leaner, and less accountable to the public it serves. What followed was not simply efficiency, but a steady shedding of obligation, where service gave way to margin and long-term stewardship to short-term return. The testimony of those who have lived through it is not nostalgia, it is evidence of what was traded away and what remains possible. The infrastructure endured; the vision did not. The work before us is not to mourn what was lost, but to reclaim a system that serves more than the balance sheet. | |
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Solutionary Rail / April 4th
We have been exploring the effects of the deregulatory interventions that the U.S. implemented from 1970 to 1980—extraordinary measures that aimed to rescue railroad corporations and keep the infrastructure they operate under private control.
As we continue this exploration, we wanted to share a perspective that vividly brings to life the significance of what happened at that time and in the years that followed—not just the harms that were inflicted, but also the opportunities that were missed, the potential that remains untapped, and the enduring urgency of attempting to turn things around.
Who better to do that than Ken Kirschling, who began working in the railroad industry shortly after its deregulation in the 1980s and remains deeply involved in it to this day? Ken is the owner and principal bridge engineer at Rail Star Engineering. By a stroke of good fortune, his office is also right next door to mine.
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Trains Magazine / April 2nd
You’ve no doubt heard the saying that making predictions is hard, particularly about the future. So it was with Amtrak’s Mardi Gras Service, which is off to such a flying start that it has proven that naysayers — myself included — were flat out wrong.
The Mardi Gras Service is the culmination of a long fight to bring passenger trains back to the Gulf Coast after the Sunset Limited service east of New Orleans was suspended in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
After years of stalled attempts to restart service, Amtrak hauled host railroads CSX and Norfolk Southern before the Surface Transportation Board in 2021. Amtrak was hellbent on beginning service between Mobile, Ala., and New Orleans in January 2022 — whether the Class I railroads were ready or not. Ultimately Amtrak, CSX, and NS reached an agreement after 11 days of marathon hearings before the STB.
| | 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! | |
AFL-CIO / March 31st
On Saturday, tens of thousands of union members participated in No Kings rallies across the nation. Americans rallied in opposition to the radical pages of Project 2025 and the fever dreams of America’s corporate billionaires, which have come to life with a relentless assault on America’s workers.
“No Kings is about standing up to the guy in the White House,” said AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler, who attended the event in Minnesota with labor leaders and thousands of union members. “But No Kings also means tearing down an economy by and for the billionaires—and instead, building it for working people. More money in our pockets—because no one in the richest country on Earth should struggle to get by. More time off—to spend with our friends and family and kids and loved ones. Equal pay for Black and Latina women—who make 58 cents on the dollar—because opportunity in this country should not depend on the color of your skin. And you know where it all starts? With a good union job for every worker in this country—because we all know, it's better in a union!”
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In These Times / April 2nd
The U.S. labor movement, like the nation at large, stands at a crossroads. The next few years might well determine whether the United States descends into an era of “electoral autocracy.” We believe this period will also set the parameters of the union movement’s power and influence for years to come, for the state of democracy and worker organization have long been deeply intertwined.
For decades the forces that have steadily eroded effective democracy and increasingly marginalized organized labor have exacerbated each other, making us vulnerable to the authoritarian danger we now face. Yet that very danger also represents an opportunity to overcome deep-seated institutional inertia, drawing elements of a cautious labor movement out of their defensive crouch, and helping them devise forms of struggle that might both revive the labor movement and renew American democracy.
President Donald Trump’s second term in office has, in a way, broken a spell. For years the pre-Trump status quo kept labor locked in a pattern of slow decline even as democracy was increasingly stifled and abridged by voter suppression, gerrymandering, filibusters, and the overweening power of organized money. But the decades-old dysfunctional status quo that gave rise to Trumpism is now crumbling under the weight of the most lawless, antidemocratic, rights-trampling administration this county has seen since the 19th century.
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In These Times / March 31st
The threat of a city government shutdown loomed large in Chicago in December 2025 as the city faced an end-of-year deadline to close a projected $1.2 billion deficit.
To counteract the impact of President Donald Trump’s 2025 tax law, Mayor Brandon Johnson had pitched a budget in October that would require some of the law’s biggest beneficiaries to pay more. His proposed payroll tax — on corporations with more than 1,000 employees — would, according to his administration, amount to less than 0.01% of the Trump tax cuts bestowed on companies like Google and Walmart.
But a standoff ensued after a group of Chicago City Council alderpersons — led by Nicole Lee, a former United Airlines executive — announced they would refuse to cross a “red line”: a new tax on the city’s largest corporations, including United. The group raised the specter of businesses fleeing Chicago in droves, despite a Chicago Sun-Times analysis casting doubt on this claim.
| | 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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