News

Sumwalt Robert Sumwalt, chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), reported some preliminary findings Monday afternoon of his agency’s investigation into the Amtrak-CSX train collision that occurred Feb. 4 near Cayce, S.C. The train had 139 passengers and eight crewmembers on board. The engineer and conductor in the cab of the locomotive were killed…

A current SMART Transportation Division conductor and a former member were killed when Amtrak Train 91 traveling from New York to Miami collided early Feb. 4 with a stationary CSX freight train east of Columbia, S.C. Brother Michael Cella, 36, of Orange Park, Fla., was a conductor out of Local 30 in Jacksonville, Fla. He,…

SMART Transportation Division Colorado State Legislative Director Carl Smith reports that efforts by some state legislators to advance a Right to Work For Less bill were stopped in committee. By a 6-3 vote, members of the state House’s Colorado House State, Veterans & Military Affairs Committee voted to postpone the bill indefinitely, effectively killing it….

Washington, D.C. (January 31, 2018) – SMART Transportation Division announced today the introduction of the Safe Freight Act (S.2360) by U.S. Senator Heidi Heitkamp (D-North Dakota), which would require two crew members — one certified locomotive engineer and one certified conductor — on our nation’s freight trains. S.2360 is a companion bill to H.R. 233, introduced…

A privately chartered Amtrak train carrying dozens of Republican members of the House and Senate crashed into a garbage truck just south of Charlottsville, Va. So far, only minor injuries have been reported amongst the train passengers. One out of the three passengers on the garbage truck has been confirmed dead. At the time of…