Summary

The Hours of Service Act, created in 1907 to improve railroad safety, limits the number of hours that railroad employees, including engineers, may work. This briefing report updates a 1992 GAO study (GAO/RCED-92-133) on how the legislation has affected railroad engineers and safety. GAO reviews accidents and work schedules more extensively, discussing (1) how the timing and frequency of human-factor accidents occurring on yard tracks differ from those on mainline tracks; (2) how accident rates differ depending on the kind of shift, the time of day, the hour of the shift, and the shift's start time variability; (3) how work schedule characteristics differ between shifts worked by engineers who had accidents and shifts worked by all engineers; and (4) how the mechanism for notifying train crews to come to work affects the ability of engineers to predict their next work shift.

GAO found that: (1) the time of day, number of hours engineers worked, and type of track had no significant impact on the number of railroad accidents; (2) accident rates at CSX and Conrail were higher for mainline track engineers than yard track engineers; (3) the CSX accident rate was higher during nondaylight hours and in the 11th hour of an engineer's shift, and Conrail's accident rate was higher when start time variability exceeded 4 hours; (4) although engineers generally had similar schedules, engineers who had accidents tended to work on mainline shifts that had greater shift variability; (5) engineers may not be sufficiently rested for work when changes in train scheduling occur because crew-calling systems do not provide adequate notification to allow engineers to properly plan their personal activities and sleep time; and (6) there was no evidence to support increased engineer notification, since engineers generally predict their work schedules 8 hours in advance.