Safety and Security: Company is Taking Steps to Address its Risk of Train Strikes but Does Not Have a Comprehensive Risk Management Process

Our objective was to assess the company’s efforts to identify and manage its risk of train strikes—incidents in which a train hits people or vehicles.

Train strikes have resulted in hundreds of fatalities and injuries in recent years and can take a heavy toll on the crew members involved—by our estimate, in fiscal year 2023, one in five of the company’s passenger engineers may have been involved in a strike.

We found that, like other railroads, the company faces inherent challenges to reducing train strikes because of factors that are difficult to control, such as suicide attempts and motorists who ignore crossing signals. Nonetheless, the company can better identify and manage train-strike related risks. It began new initiatives to do so during our audit; however, embedding ongoing initiatives into a more comprehensive, proactive risk management process could help the company better identify all major risks and make informed decisions about where to allocate its limited resources. We identified a list of key practices to aid this effort, such as collecting input from train crews about specific hazards and doing a cost-benefit analysis of different mitigation steps. The company already has many positive efforts underway that align with each of these practices. In addition, we found the data Amtrak collects on train strikes and reports to the Federal Railroad Administration had some discrepancies, which the company corrected during our audit.

We recommended that Amtrak develop a comprehensive, proactive process to identify and manage the risk of train strikes. As it institutes this process, the company should consider expanding implementation of the key practices we identified, as appropriate. We also recommend that it implement a process to regularly review and reconcile its train strike data to ensure its accuracy.