Federal Railroad Administration January 2006 – Federal Register Recent Federal Regulation Documents

FRA announces the next meeting of the RSAC, a Federal Advisory Committee that develops railroad safety regulations through a consensus process. The RSAC meeting topics include opening remarks from the FRA Administrator, an update on the National Rail Safety Action Plan, a discussion of track issues, hazardous material non-accident releases, a rail security update, and the Collision Analysis Study (concluding work previously undertaken by the Collision Analysis Working Group). Status reports will be given on the Passenger Safety, Railroad Operating Rules, and Roadway Worker Safety working groups. The report of the Railroad Operating Rules Working Group is expected to be its final report on preparation of a notice of proposed rulemaking to address three principal causes of human factor train accidents, and the Committee may be asked to vote on the recommendations contained in that report if available sufficiently in advance of the meeting. The Committee will be asked to vote to accept a task to review and revise the Railroad Locomotive Safety Standards, and FRA may offer a task regarding improvement of the Track Safety Standards (including resolution of issues raised in comments under the interim final rule on joint integrity in continuous welded rail).

Using data from Management Information System annual reports, FRA has determined that the 2004 rail industry random testing positive rate was 0.94 percent for drugs and 0.18 percent for alcohol. Since the industry-wide random drug testing positive rate has remained below 1.0 percent for the last two years, the Federal Railroad Administrator (Administrator) has determined that the minimum annual random drug testing rate for the period January 1, 2006, through December 31, 2006, will remain at 25 percent of covered railroad employees. Since the random alcohol testing violation rate has remained below 0.5 percent for the last two years, the Administrator has determined that the minimum random alcohol testing rate will remain at 10 percent of covered railroad employees for the period January 1, 2006, through December 31, 2006.