Railroad Safety

New Approach Needed for Effective FRA Safety Inspection Program Gao ID: RCED-90-194 July 31, 1990

Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO reviewed the Federal Railroad Administration's (FRA) railroad safety inspection program, focusing on: (1) inspection coverage standards; (2) how FRA used data to target railroads for inspection; (3) follow-up actions taken on inspection results; and (4) uniformity in the application of safety regulations.

GAO found that FRA did not: (1) provide assurance that railroads were operating safely under the safety inspection program; (2) establish minimum inspection coverage standards defining the frequency of railroad inspections or standards for the size of the territory an inspector was expected to cover; (3) analyze existing inspection and accident data to target railroads for inspection; (4) require railroads to report actions taken to correct safety defects; (5) routinely perform follow-up inspections to determine whether safety defects were corrected; and (6) uniformly apply safety regulations, which resulted in FRA regions filing different numbers of violations for the same defective safety conditions.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

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