The Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) of the U.S. Department of Transportation is the federal agency primarily responsible for promoting and regulating the safety of the railroad industry. The FRA's rail safety programs were last authorized in 1994 ( P.L. 103 - 440 ); that authorization expired at the end of FY1998. FRA's safety programs have continued to be funded through annual appropriations bills. Reauthorization of the FRA is taking place in a context of improvement in most measures of rail safety. However, there continue to be around 1,000 rail-related deaths each year. The trend of improvement in some rail safety measures, such as train accidents and deaths in grade-crossing collisions, has leveled off in recent years, and with forecasts of significant growth in rail traffic in the future, there is concern over the need to make more progress in rail safety. Several hearings have been held in the 110 th Congress in both the House and Senate on reauthorization of FRA. An Administration proposal to reauthorize FRA has been introduced, by request, as the Federal Railroad Safety Accountability and Improvement Act ( H.R. 1516 and S. 918 ). No action has been taken on this legislation in either the House or the Senate. Representative James Oberstar, Chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee has introduced a reauthorization proposal, the Federal Railroad Safety Improvement Act of 2007 ( H.R. 2095 ). A managers' amendment was adopted, with amendments, and was ordered to be reported out of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee on June 14, 2007. The amended bill was reported by the committee on September 19, 2007, and was approved by the House of Representatives on October 17, 2007. Senator Frank Lautenberg, Chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee's Subcommittee on Surface Transportation and Merchant Marine Infrastructure, Safety, and Security, has also introduced a reauthorization proposal, the Railroad Safety Enhancement Act of 2007 ( S. 1889 ). A managers' amendment was adopted and ordered to be reported out of the Commerce Committee on September 27, 2007; the bill was reported out on March 3, 2008. The Senate substituted S. 1889 , with amendments, for the text of H.R. 2095 , and passed it by unanimous consent on August 1, 2008. This report describes the major issues in the debate over reauthorization of FRA in the 110 th Congress. It also describes the major provisions of H.R. 2095 as passed by the House and as passed by the Senate. These include changes to the rail hours of service law, including limitations on limbo time; imposition of a deadline for the implementation of positive train control by railroads; and new requirements for highway-rail grade crossings. The nation's railroad sector consists of both freight rail companies and those passenger rail systems that use the nation's intercity rail network (i.e., both Amtrak and commuter rail systems). The sector consists of roughly 570 freight railroads and 118 passenger, commuter, and excursion railroads. These organizations employ around 235,000 people and operate roughly 220,000 miles of track. The vast majority of the rail sector consists of freight railroad operations. The freight railroad industry is divided into three classes, based on operating revenues; there are only 7 railroads in the top category, Class I, for which the threshold is roughly $320 million in annual revenues, but those 7 railroads represent about 70% of freight rail industry employment and own roughly 70% of total U.S. rail mileage. The Staggers Rail Act of 1980 ( P.L. 96 - 448 ) largely deregulated the freight rail industry. Since that time, there has been extensive consolidation of the industry. Employment has been reduced from 480,000 (1980) to 235,000 (2006), while freight revenue ton-miles have increased from 918 million (1980) to 1.96 trillion (2006). The miles of road operated in freight service have been reduced from 177,000 (1980) to 141,000 (2005), while the number of train-miles operated has increased from 718 million (1980) to 811 million (2006). The number of passenger-miles has increased from 12 billion (1980) to 16 billion (2006). During this period, the overall safety record of the industry has shown great improvement. Between 1980 and 1994, the annual rate of train accidents (that is, the number of accidents divided by the number of miles traveled by trains) declined from almost 12 accidents per million train miles to just under 4 per million train miles. However, since 1994 the improvement has leveled off, and the rate of train accidents has varied from 3.5 to 4.4 per million train miles since then. In addition to this lack of improvement in the train accident rate, several recent serious accidents have raised concerns about the need for further improvement in rail safety. The numbers of grade-crossing collisions and resulting injuries and deaths declined until 2003, but has shown little improvement since then. Most rail-related deaths are to pedestrians trespassing on rail lines and motorists colliding with trains at highway rail grade crossings. While there are nearly 1,000 rail-related deaths each year, only around 20-30 rail employees are killed while on duty each year, and railroads have lower employee injury rates than other modes of transportation and most other major industries. FRA classifies the causes of train accidents into five categories: human factors, track and structures, equipment, signal and train control, and miscellaneous. Of these, human factors and track are responsible for the majority of train accidents. Examples of human factor causes of accidents include improperly positioning the switches that determine which track a train will follow (the cause of the Graniteville, SC accident), moving rail cars without checking for safe conditions in the vicinity, and leaving rail cars in a position that blocks track. Examples of track conditions that lead to accidents include defective joint bars (that connect one piece of rail to the next), defective or ineffective crossties (that maintain the proper alignment of the parallel rails that form the track), and broken or worn switches. Without further reductions in the rate of train accidents, the number of train accidents and resulting deaths and injuries is likely to grow, due to expected increases in train traffic. The Department of Transportation (DOT) has estimated that between 1998 and 2020 the amount of freight moved by rail (measured by weight) will increase by roughly 50%. Also, many communities are interested in establishing, or expanding already existing, commuter rail operations (which generally operate on the freight rail network) to provide transportation alternatives and manage congestion. Thus, the number of train miles on the nation's freight rail network is likely to significantly increase in the coming years. If train accident rates do not improve, this may lead to increased numbers of accidents, injuries and deaths. FRA's role in rail safety is threefold: to assess the safety of rail operations; to promulgate regulations to promote cost-effective improvements in safety standards; and to enforce compliance with federal rail safety laws and regulations. These regulations address such topics as track condition, passenger and freight equipment, signal and train control systems, maintenance of active warning devices at highway-rail grade crossings, accident reporting, alcohol and drug testing, operating rules and practices, and many others. FRA also enforces the Hazardous Materials Regulations, prescribed by DOT's Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, as they apply to rail transportation. FRA is a relatively small agency in relation to the size of the railroad industry it oversees. It has around 800 employees, of whom 650 are classified as safety personnel, including around 430 inspectors (supplemented by 160 state inspectors who work with FRA on safety oversight of railroads), to oversee an industry with over 235,000 employees, 220,000 miles of track, 158,000 signals and switches, and over 1.3 million freight cars and other equipment in service. Although FRA and the state investigators conduct some 63,000 inspections each year, these inspections cover only a small fraction of the operations of railroads each year. To make the most of its resources, FRA focuses inspections at locations judged as likely to have safety problems based on accident data and results of previous inspections. FRA's annual budget for its core safety responsibilities (that is, excluding funding for grants to Amtrak) is roughly $200 million. FRA's traditional approach to safety is to regulate the design of rail structures and the behavior of rail workers, then to use inspections to enforce compliance with the specific standards. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) has noted that "these inspections focus on compliance with minimum standards and are not designed to determine how well railroads are managing safety risks throughout their systems that could lead to accidents." In response to reviews of its work by the DOT Inspector General and the Office of Management and Budget, FRA has begun to adopt new approaches to supplement its traditional safety program. These include efforts to target its inspections using a more quantitative assessment of risk, as well as new initiatives that make use of risk management approaches to improving safety. For example, FRA has implemented a Confidential Close Call Reporting Program pilot project. This project allows employees of participating railroads to report close calls—that is, incidents where an accident could have occurred, but didn't. The information on the close calls is kept confidential, so that both employees and the participating railroads are shielded from punishment for providing the information. A team composed of representatives of the participating railroads, labor organizations, FRA, and the Bureau of Transportation Statistics will review the information to identify safety problems. A similar program has been in place in the aviation industry for many years, and has contributed to improvements in safety there. In response to concerns raised by the accidents experienced in 2004 and early 2005, in May 2005 FRA instituted a new safety action plan to improve rail safety.