Riding a rail car to check the tracks has killed 14 workers since 2020

The National Transportation Safety Board says a common railroad practice has killed 14 workers and seriously injured two more since October 2020, and it wants railroads to stop doing it. In a recommendation issued Sept. 21, 2026, the board said it has investigated 16 accidents in that span involving workers riding rail equipment to watch the track ahead of a moving train. Two additional investigations opened in August 2026 alone. The NTSB is now telling the Federal Railroad Administration and every Class 1 freight railroad to prohibit the practice outright.

That practice is known inside the industry as a shoving movement. Rather than pulling railcars behind a locomotive, crews sometimes push them ahead instead, and because the engineer in the cab often cannot see far enough down the track, some railroads let a worker ride the leading car to serve as its eyes — a task the industry calls point protection. It is meant to catch a misaligned switch, a stalled vehicle or debris on the rail before the train reaches it.

The Accident Record Behind the Recommendation

The NTSB’s numbers show why officials describe the practice as a recurring pattern rather than a string of isolated incidents. Riding equipment to provide point protection, instead of walking ahead of the train or using another sightline method, was involved in 70% of conductor fatalities reported to the FRA — 14 of the 20 such deaths on record — and in 79% of switching-related deaths recorded industry-wide from 2011 through 2021, or 27 of 34. Sixteen accidents tied to the practice have now been investigated since October 2020, leaving 14 workers dead and two more seriously injured.

The board’s investigators put it bluntly in the recommendation report: riding railroad equipment during shoving movements is “unjustifiably used within the railroad industry given the risk of bodily injury or death,” they wrote, adding that safer alternatives to the practice are already in use elsewhere in the industry.

The Denver Collision That Forced the Issue

The immediate trigger was a collision on Aug. 5, 2025, in BNSF’s Globeville Yard in Denver, an incident the FRA catalogs as accident RRD25FR022. A crew was performing a shoving movement when the train passed over a misaligned crossover switch. Three standing railcars and five cars from the shoving train derailed, and the conductor — riding the lead car to provide point protection — was thrown from it, then pinned as the railcar toppled onto him. He survived with serious injuries, and the NTSB opened an investigation, docketed DCA26SR010, that became the basis for the Sept. 21 recommendations.

It was the 16th accident the agency has now tied to riding equipment for point protection since October 2020, and the second such investigation the NTSB opened in the two months before the board acted.

What NTSB Told the FRA and the Railroads to Do

In its Sept. 21 announcement, the NTSB recommended that the Federal Railroad Administration and every Class 1 railroad prohibit workers from riding rail equipment to provide point protection and require safer alternatives in its place. Both were also told to conduct, document and regularly update site-specific hazard assessments before work begins, share those findings with the employees doing the job, and address identified hazards during pre-job safety briefings. A parallel recommendation went to the American Short Line and Regional Railroad Association, asking it to warn its member railroads of the same hazard.

NTSB Chairwoman Jennifer Homendy tied the recommendations directly to the death toll. “Railroad workers deserve a safe workplace and should never have to risk their lives,” she said.

Vice Chairman Michael Graham was more pointed: “Repeated accidents that seriously injure or kill railroad workers are unacceptable,” he said. Board Member John DeLeeuw added that “moving rail equipment safely should not expose employees to unacceptable risk.” Under existing federal operating rules, individual railroads are largely left to decide when and how a worker rides equipment for point protection — the discretion the board’s recommendation asks the FRA to close off.

The FRA’s Next Move, and the Fixes Already in Use

NTSB recommendations carry no force of law on their own. They are advisory findings sent to the agencies and companies best positioned to act, leaving it to the Federal Railroad Administration to decide whether to write the requirement into a binding safety rule. None of the Class 1 railroads named in the recommendation has publicly committed to changing how it performs shoving movements, and the FRA has not said whether it intends to act on the request.

For the families of the 14 workers killed since 2020, the board’s message is that a fix already exists: alternatives to riding equipment for point protection are already used successfully elsewhere in the freight industry, and the Sept. 21 recommendation simply asks the FRA and the railroads to require them everywhere else, too.

This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.

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