I have been Chairman of the NTSB now for five years - long enough, I hope, to have begun to understand what the government can do, and what the private sector must do, to keep transportation safe. And I think I have seen as well, the necessity of respecting the many singularities that differentiate the modes of transportation. All transport is infrastructure, but some, like the highways and airways, depend on the government to build or operate critical components. And direct government regulation of speeds, or altitudes, or direction of travel is a central and accepted part of the backdrop. I can tell you there are some problems here.
Railroads travel largely over their own rights of way, nearly all in the private domain.
NTSB investigators, if not secretly viewed as trespassers, are certainly newcomers to the scene. It is not too many decades past that the Interstate Commerce Commission did accident investigations by delegating to the railroad itself the responsibility to reflect the circumstances of its mishaps. What appears now to be an inexplicably quaint approach actually reflected the fact that accidents typically occurred on private property and were of nearly invisible public consequence. Times have changed. Cargo and capacities and the proximity of rails to spreading population have made the potential for a catastrophic hazardous materials collision a nightmarish potential that communities do disaster drills to prepare for.