Norfolk Southern sparked renewed concerns about flaws being missed during railcar inspections when it told employees last week they should spend no more than a minute looking at each car. But the railroad said the rule simply reflects the current industry standard, and there are no plans for disciplining employees for missing that one-minute target.

Rail unions have been raising the alarm for several years about inspections being rushed across the industry in the wake of the railroads eliminating one-third of all the jobs as they adopted the lean operating model that has become the standard.

The Federal Railroad Administration’s Chief Safety Officer Karl Alexy said the agency was already tracking inspection times closely across the industry before the new announcement from Norfolk Southern, and the agency will be watching how the railroad implements it.

“If they really are going to be held to that, I’m very concerned about defects not being found. I think that is pretty quick,” Alexy said.

Railroad safety concerns became widespread in February 2023 when a Norfolk Southern train derailed, spilled hazardous chemicals and caught fire in East Palestine, Ohio.

The railroad — and the entire industry — promised reforms after that disastrous wreck. But Alexy said there hasn’t been much significant improvement in railroads’ overall safety record in recent years.

The concerns about rushed railcar inspections are part of rail labor’s broader concerns about whether the lean Precision Scheduled Railroading model that railroads are using is more dangerous.

Alexy said one of the key challenges for the industry is that so many experienced workers were lost because of all the job cuts in recent years — because of the new operating model and the sharp downturn in business during the pandemic — that the railroads are relying on a large number of newer employees who are still learning all the risks of the job.

Norfolk Southern executives said last year that the railroad would back away from rushing inspections because of safety concerns. But the new directive about one-minute inspections issued not long after Mark George was promoted to be the railroad’s new CEO this fall appears to reverse that stance.

Norfolk Southern is not alone in pushing for inspections to be done quickly to keep trains moving.

The Federal Railroad Administration found this year that at all the major freight railroads, carmen spent an average of 1 minute and 38 seconds looking over each car while a federal inspector was watching. But documents showed that when an inspector isn’t there, inspections were being done in 44 seconds per car.

The Transportation Communications Union that represents the carmen tasked with inspecting railcars maintains that it isn’t possible to check the 90-plus points per side they are supposed to check on each railcar within such a short time, so clearly things are being missed.