With last week’s 7 feet of snow in upstate New York heralding an early winter, railroads crisscrossing Chicago are rushing to open 24-hour command centers, install heaters to keep switches from freezing, and plotting ways to reroute traffic. The aim is to avoid the gridlock t [...]
The SMART Transportation Division has set the dates and locations of the union’s two 2015 regional meetings. The western regional meeting will be held June 29 – July 1 at the Arizona Biltmore in Phoenix. The eastern regional meeting will be held July 13-15 at the Rhode Island [...]
Federal regulators who concluded that an engineer’s sleep apnea caused a deadly train derailment in New York adopted several recommendations Wednesday for better screening of such disorders, including a call for improved physician training. The National Transportation Safety [...]
Metro-North Railroad and Long Island Rail Road won approval from a committee of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) Board of Directors on Monday, Nov. 17, 2014 to award contracts totaling $34.6 million for the purchase of inward- and outward-facing cameras in the [...]
WASHINGTON – Amtrak is taking action to improve the on-time performance (OTP) of its trains that operate over tracks controlled by other railroads. In a complaint filed on Nov. 17, Amtrak is asking the Surface Transportation Board (STB) to investigate Norfolk Southern Railway [...]
The upcoming months are historically the most deadly time of year for railroad workers, with more career-ending injuries than any other period of the year. In February 1998, a Switching Operations Fatalities Analysis (SOFA) working group, with representatives from the Federal [...]
The official SMART Constitution, as amended by SMART delegates at the first SMART General Convention, is now available on both the SMART website at smart-union.org and the Transportation Division website at www.utu.org. In January 2014, the SMART Sheet Metal and Transportatio [...]
Retired former Local 911 (Minneapolis) Chairperson Fred J. Croes Jr., 78, a mentor to many United Transportation Union and SMART Transportation Division officers in the Upper Midwest, died Nov. 12 of natural causes. Croes was born May 18, 1936, in St. Paul, Minn. At age 18, h [...]
North Dakota’s energy regulators are considering new rules to make the state’s “Bakken” crude oil, which has been involved in a number of explosive train crashes, safer to move by rail. Proposed standards announced Thursday by the state Department of M [...]
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