Today (March 31) has a pretty damning article on the safety culture (or lack of) at NS. It is behind a paywall but can probably be accessed.
Among many items discussed, the article points out that NS sets guidlines to inspect a railcar in one minute.
The article points out that derailments have fallen over the years (by half since 2000). Further NS reported fewer derailments in 2022 than any year in the past 10 years.
Pretty good article…worth the read. Of course there is other considerable BIG NEWS today also including the arrest of a WSJ reporter in Moscow…among other things.
I dont have access to data, so it is difficult to comment…but if you are running PSR operations with longer trains, then your “train miles” would decrease. There must be other matrix to measure safety in the rail industry. Perhaps others can comment.
There certainly seem to have been a number of “big bang” high visiblity derailments of late.
Wall Street activist investors exert pressures on a company for various metrics to be reported in certain ways. Safety metrics are one of those where pressure gets placed on the scale of measurement.