PRINT THIS SPEECH (298K PDF) 

Shortly after this, we implemented a quality process at IAIS in which I served as Chairman of the first Safety Committee in 1992. We involved members of labor and management to try to come up with improvements that would result in a reduction of personal injuries. We created a new Safety Rules manual that reflected today’s conditions and wrote it in a manner that made it easy to understand. We started local safety committees in the field to report conditions that needed attention in relation to safety; however, our FRA reportable injuries still continued to be high no matter what program or process we implemented.

In 1998 we suffered another death; a Maintenance of Way employee got off of his machine on the Mississippi River Bridge and fell off the bridge into the water, and he could not swim. This incident caused us to become involved with the FRA SACP (Safety Awareness and Compliance Program) process. This process involved labor, management, and the FRA facilitators. Committees were formed at both the senior and local levels and met monthly. At about the same time the President started a Pro-formance program which involved all employees of the company. Training programs were also implemented by the Human Resources (HR) department as well as a new process to handle personnel injuries when they occurred. The serious injuries went down, but overall, still remained high for a company of our size.

In 2000, several top-level management people left the company and I found myself with some additional duties, such as representing the company in six legal cases that were headed to court over injuries that dated back to 1993. Through these court cases (which we won all but one), I saw a common denominator. It appeared that none of the injuries resulted in disciplinary action or was fully investigated by management at the time that they occurred. Documentation from investigating officers was non-existent.  I found out later that we had implemented a process in our HR department of removing discipline from an employee’s file after a period of months had elapsed, thus removing any work history incident information. We also had a history of major derailments on both the main line and in yards, again, with no documentation on file.

With the recession in place in mid-2000 and looking for ways to conserve cash, we decided to slow the railroad down. We lowered the maximum speed from 40 MPH to 25 MPH to conserve maintenance dollars and reduce train-handling incidents and derailments. As a result, we have not had a main line derailment in about three years, saving the company several millions of dollars which we were able to put into the track. Our average derailment cost had been about $600,000-$700,000 per year. The other reason to slow down was a tremendous amount of new Engineers who had little experience in handling large trains with 6 to 7 locomotives.  When the Iowa Interstate was formed in 1984, all of the employees were former Rock Island employees; 15 to 16 years later all of those employees were retiring.  We were going outside to hire new conductors, engineers and mechanical personnel.  And so we found ourselves with a new problem—younger employees that we had to train who were not used to running a 10-12,000 ton train.

[<<] PREVIOUS     PAGE   1      2      3      4      5      6     NEXT [>>]

Position Papers Main Index     |     Top of Page

Company Overview   |   RDC Management Team   |   Operating Entities

News   |   Photo Gallery   |  Contact Us