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April 2026
By Julie Sneider, Senior Editor
For the past decade, the Short Line Safety Institute (SLSI) has helped regional and smaller freight, commuter and tourist railroads improve the safety culture of their organizations through assessments, hazardous materials education and leadership skills development.
As it enters its second decade of spreading the rail safety message, the institute soon will take its programming to the next level. Next year, the SLSI plans to launch a “Safety Train” that will offer hands-on instruction in hazmat transportation to railroaders and first responders.
In 2024, SLSI received $2.5 million in federal funding to build the train, which will feature a tank car for teaching railroaders and responders about hazmat; a box car that will be converted into a classroom; and a flat car modified into a training platform containing hazmat tank-car valves and related equipment.
“We will move the Safety Train to railroads and emergency responder organizations so they can understand the size and scale of this type of rail equipment, then climb on the flat car to examine all the valve arrangements while still in a safe environment,” says SLSI Executive Director Tom Murta.
SLSI worked with TrinityRail to acquire the cars and contracted TKDA to convert the box car into a classroom. In early March, the institute issued a request for proposals (RFP) seeking a vendor to modify the flat car into the training platform. RFP submissions are due April 15; bid selection is slated for April 30; and the project’s start date is set for mid-May.
The goal is to have the Safety Train completed and ready for display at the American Short Line and Regional Railroad Association’s 2027 annual meeting, which will be held in New Orleans, Murta says.
Since its founding, the SLSI has conducted 183 safety culture assessments at no cost to smaller railroads. Assessments typically take a week and are conducted on site by a team of independent professionals.
The process entails field observations, online employee surveys, onsite employee interviews and a review of the railroad’s safety documents. After the assessment, a short line’s management team receives an evaluation of their railroad’s safety performance using the “Ten Core Elements of a Strong Safety Culture” as developed by the U.S. Department of Transportation.
Safety culture is defined as “the shared values, actions and behaviors that demonstrate a commitment to safety over competing goals and demands.”
Upon completing an assessment and making safety improvements, a railroad can seek a second assessment to measure progress. The institute offers various tools and resources to help railroads meet their safety culture improvement goals.
Railroads’ interest in seeking first, second and even third assessments has grown over the past few years, and safety awareness among short lines has continuously improved since the SLSI began its work, according to Murta.
“Looking back, we see trends where railroads did well in helping co-workers be safe and working safely together,” he says, adding that an important element in a safety culture is when employees feel comfortable reporting concerns to management.
If a railroad has an open dialogue, employees are willing to talk and become involved, says Murta.
“They feel empowered to stop the work, approach management and ask for changes to be made to help them do the job better — but more importantly, safer,” he says.
SLSI experts also can help short lines find the tools and resources for documenting, recording and updating their railroads’ safety action plans.
“We have found over the past half-dozen years that railroads that have a strong and usable safety action plan tend to have higher safety culture measurements,” Murta says.
Murta and SLSI’s staff are grateful for the support the institute has received over the years from the federal government, including the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA). In fact, current FRA Administrator David Fink is personally familiar with the institute’s work.
“I’ve known David for a long time and he’s a strong supporter of our program,” Murta says. “He realizes the value of it, and I think he feels it’s a worthwhile effort for government money.”
Fink’s familiarity with the SLSI dates back to its start in 2014-2015, when Fink was CEO of Pan Am Railways Inc., a regional that operated 1,200 track miles across New England. Fink and leaders of two other nearby railroads were motivated to act on rail safety issues at the ASLRRA level in the aftermath of the July 2013 rail accident in Lac-Megantic, Quebec, when an unmanned, runaway Montreal, Maine and Atlantic Railway train carrying flammable crude oil derailed and exploded in the community’s downtown, killing 47 people.
As an ASLRRA member at that time, Fink and his two colleagues understood that many small railroads lacked the resources to educate and train their workers in safer practices.
“The accident kind of triggered us to say, ‘Hey, what can we do?’ And we got together with General [Richard] Timmons, who ran the short line association at that time, and Sen. [Susan] Collins’ office to see if we could get some help in getting these railroads to have a different way of looking at railroad safety,” Fink recalled in a recent interview with Progressive Railroading.
A year after the Lac-Megantic accident, the FRA provided the grant funds that enabled the ASLRRA to set up the SLSI. In its first year of operation, SLSI approached Fink and Pan Am to be among the first railroaders to undergo the voluntary safety culture assessment. Fink says he learned early on that such assessments can be eye-openers in that they can uncover results about a railroad’s safety track record that railroad managers may not want to hear.
For example, one thing Fink recalls learning from Pan Am’s first assessment was that employees thought he and the company’s managers didn’t go out into the field enough. That information was news to him, Fink says.
“I was a little disappointed. But you [as a manager or executive] must be able to take this kind of information and understand that it’s not going to be all peaches and cream,” he says.
After Pan Am went through the first assessment, Fink asked the SLSI to return for a second review. By then, the institute had improved its assessment process and the railroad had implemented some safety reforms. Fink believes Pan Am was the only railroad in the SLSI’s first few years to voluntarily undergo two safety culture assessments.
“I always will appreciate the folks at the Short Line Safety Institute for doing what they did. We learned from the process; we made our property safer,” Fink says.
The safety lessons learned stemmed not only from the assessments, but from tragedy: In 2021, a Pan Am employee was killed during a switching operation. Then, in early 2022, another employee was seriously injured in an accident. Both incidents occurred as Pan Am was in the process of being acquired by CSX.
“The rail business is not dangerous; it’s very unforgiving,” says Fink, who was a fifth-generation railroader prior to becoming the FRA administrator. “If you don’t follow the rules, bad things can happen.”
Railroaders have to remain vigilant and situationally aware at all times, or tragedy can occur, he says.
And regardless of size, every railroad must strive for a strong safety culture, he believes.
“We [railroads] are dealing with very heavy machines in an extreme operating environment with weather,” says Fink. “We always have to be on guard. We have to have people well trained. We have to have the right equipment. And we have to make sure everybody out there is paying attention.”
While Class Is and some rail-car suppliers already operate safety trains used to educate railroaders and emergency responders on handling train derailments or hazmat situations, the SLSI’s future unit will be helpful particularly in training short liners and volunteer first responders in small and rural communities, Fink believes.
The future Safety Train and all the SLSI resources are invaluable for helping smaller railroaders get up to speed in making their operations safer, he adds.
“There’s no doubt about it: I’m glad that we [at Pan Am] did the safety cultural assessments,” says Fink. “You have to be ready for receiving some tough comments, but your workforce is better for it and your management is better for it.”
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