Federal Railroad Administration December 24, 2014 – Federal Register Recent Federal Regulation Documents

This rule maintains the rail equipment accident/incident monetary reporting threshold at $10,500 for railroad accidents/ incidents involving property damage that occur during calendar year (CY) 2015 that FRA's accident/incident reporting regulations require to be reported to the agency. FRA is maintaining the reporting threshold at the CY 2014 level because, in part, wage data for the second-quarter of 2014, (the data used to calculate the threshold) was abnormally high due to retroactive payment of wage increases resulting from labor contract agreements affecting several railroads. FRA believes that the data does not accurately reflect the changes in labor costs for the second-quarter of 2014 and leads to an overinflated threshold calculation for CY 2015. In addition, FRA is maintaining the monetary threshold for CY 2015 at the CY 2014 level while it reexamines the method for calculating the monetary threshold it last updated in 2005.