It has been three years since the East Palestine derailment of February 2023, when thousands had to be evacuated from a small Eastern Ohio community after multiple tanker cars containing the hazardous chemical vinyl chloride derailed, throwing rail safety into the mainstream.

In the political fallout from the accident, new regulations on freight rail were proposed in the House but eventually died in the Senate. Now those reforms are back in Washington, reintroduced to both the House and Senate as the Bipartisan Railway Safety Act of 2026.

“Three years ago, many Ohioans understandably lost faith in the safety and reliability of our nation’s railways after the accident in East Palestine, Ohio,” said Republican Senator Jon Husted in a February press release. “By using a balanced, data-driven approach to advancing rail safety, my bill would protect Ohio’s communities while supporting the freight rail industry across the country.”

This, understandably, has caused some bristling in the press, such as in one March 8th Washington Post editorial, which reads, “It’s understandable that Congress wanted to do something. But [...] the bill consists of unrelated mandates that would drive costs higher and slow innovation.”

As it goes on, the editorial boasts about just how safe the American railroad is, claiming that this legislation is both ignorant and wholly unwarranted. Claims that would be a lot easier to take seriously if, on the day before the piece ran, Norfolk Southern, the same railroad responsible for what happened in Ohio, managed to put a train on the ground on the iconic Horseshoe Curve just outside Altoona, PA.

This led to the delay or cancellation of upwards of 50 trains a day that use the curve while traveling over the busy former Pennsylvania Railroad mainline between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, including Amtrak’s services along the line.

Far from an isolated event, this comes just after Norfolk Southern had another derailment in the same area earlier this year when 60 cars derailed on February 6th.

Just while writing this story, 23 tanker cars off a Union Pacific train derailed in the Houston suburbs Wednesday, two of which started leaking ethanol, and just today, March 19th, another Union Pacific train derailed in California.

Do American railroads have a culture of safety? Maybe. What they definitely do have is a culture of putting cars on the ground, especially ones full of hazmat chemicals that are best summarized by the phrase “don’t breathe that in, folks.”

So, back on Capitol Hill, are there issues with the Bipartisan Railway Safety Act? Sure. Legislation is very rarely flawless.

But the bill also proposes doing things like prohibiting railroads from imposing time requirements on car inspections, increasing penalties for safety violations, and requiring two crew members to operate a train (something that in earnest should have been done immediately after the 2013 Lac-Mégantic disaster that killed 47), which are all worthwhile proposals.

Furthermore, it’s worth pushing back on the idea that scrutiny on the rail industry is somehow unwarranted. Stop condescending to lawmakers by saying this bill is just the emotional spillover from what happened in East Palestine.

It’s true that the railroad is far safer than trucking, as Michael F. Gorman pointed out in his recent article for Fortune, writing, “In the 50 years that the Bureau of Transportation Statistics has collected data on fatalities by mode, trucks have caused nearly 30,000 deaths, while rail has caused less than 500—less than 2%.”

But facts like that should be evidence for why we should take more trucks off the road, not a justification for being satisfied with where the industry is currently. Rail safety has undoubtedly improved over the past few decades and has thankfully moved far away from the era when a brakeman having all 10 fingers was seen as a sign of inexperience and when each of the nation’s large railroads would kill hundreds a year without a thought.

But we were only able to move past the era because there was pressure to do better, and if we want to keep what happened in East Palestine from happening again and again, we must assert that a safe railroad isn’t one that’s satisfied with incremental improvements in year-over-year accident percentages.

A safe railroad is one that is both constantly pushing and being pushed to eliminate major derailments and fatalities on the tracks entirely. That, a deathless railroad, would be something worth being satisfied over.

Berkshire Hathaway, the holding company that owns BNSF Railway, welcomed a new CEO this past January as Greg Abel stepped up to succeed the legendary Warren Buffett in his role helming the company.

Thus, it was his turn to write the annual letter to shareholders, which opens Berkshire’s 153-page marathon of an annual report. From a railroad angle, it’s mostly pretty uninteresting, but there are a few exceptions pertaining to BNSF.

There are, of course, the routine updates on equity and cash flows, reaffirmations about how safe operations, reliable service, and a competitive cost structure are the keys to our success and so on.

However, one line in particular did turn some heads in the rail industry press. On page twelve, in a paragraph laying out what the company needs to do better, the letter reads:

“[Improved services] are not enough; more progress is needed to translate operational improvements into stronger financial results. We view operating margin (the inverse of the industry’s operating ratio) as the best measure of performance. In 2025, BNSF’s operating margin improved to 34.5% from 32.0% in 2024. It remained only modestly above its five-year average.”

Essentially, “Our railroad is doing well and is incredibly profitable, but it’s just not quite making enough money.” Specifically, the complaint is that the company’s operating ratio, calculated by dividing operating expenses by total revenue, isn’t good enough. This introduces some problems.

Because if your system is running safely and efficiently, shipments are moving through the network at a speed “faster than in nearly any year in the company’s history,” and your metrics for success are showing gloom, it either means you’ve taken the wrong measurements or you have the wrong standard for what “success” looks like.

Saying the Class I railroads obsess over their operating ratios to a fault is not a novel observation, even from within the industry. In fact, at a September 2025 conference, former CSX CEO Joe Hinrichs spoke against such a focus on the operating ratio.

“You can see all that activist activity and all of the things that went on to drive that obsession with [operating ratio] improvement, which again, unto itself, is not bad [...] But there wasn’t, at the same time, the same drive to grow volume,” Hinrichs said.

Two weeks after that conference, he was out of a job, dismissed from his position as CEO. A decision that was largely credited to pressure on the company from activist investor Ancora Holdings, who had previously criticized Hinrichs.

In a statement on the firing, Ancora said they regretted having to push for leadership change so publicly but that “This should be a cautionary tale for all corporate leaders who consider putting their own agenda ahead of shareholders’ best interests.”

Financially speaking, BNSF is steaming along just fine. Operating earnings increased 7.8%, net earnings increased 8.8%, and the railroad’s operating expenses declined 3.7% between 2024 and 2025. It produced a healthy $8.1 billion in net cash flows last year and returned $4.4 billion in dividends alone, but it’s still not enough to satisfy the demands of the operating ratio.

The letter goes on, “Each one-percentage-point improvement in operating margin generates approximately $230 million of incremental operating cash flow for our owners.” Even for a Class I, giving a dollar figure for how much cash investors can expect based on each percentage point they can scrape off the railroad is egregious.

But it’s a known cycle, a constant push for less and less spending to drive the operating ratio further and further down and the stock price further and further up. A cycle of corporate starvation that will, over time, become fatal.

A healthier corporation, one steering based on more reasonable metrics, would turn its actions and financial resources towards other issues.

Such as how BNSF has only managed to gain 0.3% overall traffic volume in the last year, and that more broadly, the American freight rail industry saw an 11% total decline in traffic between 2014 and 2024 as trucking takes on more and more of the industry’s modal share, according to TD Cowen analysts.

Maybe BNSF would have looked toward reducing its GHG emissions by more than the 30% they claim to be shooting for before 2030. Something it claims it will do through renewable diesel fuel initiatives and what it calls “long-term solutions” in developing still unproven battery-electric and hydrogen locomotives.

For a comparison on the emissions point, in the five-year time period between 2019 and 2023, the very different but similarly massive Indian Railway network managed to electrify close to 19,000 miles of track (the entire BNSF system totals 23,000 route miles), achieving a 99.4% electrification rate by December 2025, almost completely eliminating tailpipe emissions from one of the largest rail systems on earth.

$4.4 billion is far too large a number of dollars to leave sitting idle for a company and industry losing both market share and the race to net zero, instead of putting it to work by fueling the system that made it.

So what does a diesel-chugging, coal-traffic-reliant company really need to stay competitive?

It needs to start by investing in itself, breathing life back into a languishing industry, and pursuing the true goal of a railroad as a piece of infrastructure: to move as much stuff as possible in as efficient a way as possible, or surrender stewardship of the rails to someone who can.