Railroad Asbestos Exposure

If you or a loved one worked for a railroad and has been diagnosed with mesothelioma, you may have a valid claim — and you may not be aware of the full range of compensation available to your family. Railroad claims also run under their own federal statute, and we can walk you through what that means before you decide anything.

A steam locomotive is a boiler on wheels, and like any boiler it was insulated to hold heat in and keep the surrounding structure and crew survivable. The boiler barrel, firebox, steam dome, throttle and steam lines, and the cab backhead were all lagged with asbestos — as block, as mixed insulating cement troweled on wet, and as cloth and rope.

However, that insulation didn't last. A locomotive vibrates continuously, cycles through enormous temperature swings, and gets worked hard between shoppings. Lagging cracked, crumbled, and fell away, and it was replaced by hand, repeatedly, over a working life measured in decades.

Boilermakers, machinists, pipefitters, and shop laborers did that work. Stripping old, dried lagging off a boiler generates far more airborne fiber than applying new material, and both operations were routine. Moreover, engineers and firemen worked in cabs where the backhead insulation was directly behind them and where every rough mile shook fiber loose.

Steam operation ended for most railroads by the late 1950s, but the locomotives were not disposed of overnight and the shops that maintained them kept working. As a result, anyone whose service reached back into the steam era, or who worked in a shop that was still tearing down steam power afterward, has a distinct exposure profile.

Dieselization didn't remove asbestos from the railroad. It relocated it.

Diesel locomotives carried asbestos insulation around engine compartments, exhaust manifolds and turbochargers, and, on passenger units, the steam generators that heated the train. Gaskets and packing throughout the engine and its auxiliaries were asbestos-based. Engine and generator work in a shop meant handling all of it.

Brake shoes and clutch materials were friction products, and asbestos was the standard friction material for most of the twentieth century. Brake work grinds and abrades that material by design. Changing shoes and cleaning brake assemblies put fiber directly into the air of an enclosed shop, and blowing the dust out with compressed air — common practice for decades — made it worse.

Passenger cars and cabooses were insulated for temperature and sound with asbestos-containing materials behind paneling and in floors and ceilings. Rebuild and refurbishment work opened those cavities.

Fixed structures added a background level of exposure across the property: shop boilers, steam lines feeding the yard and buildings, pipe insulation, and the buildings' own fireproofing and floor tile.

Overall, the diesel era moved the material around the property while you went on breathing it.

Location did most of the damage. Railroad repair work happened indoors, in roundhouses, back shops, car shops, and engine houses — large buildings, but enclosed, and ventilated poorly relative to what was being generated inside them.

In addition, several trades worked those buildings simultaneously. Boilermakers stripped lagging on one track while machinists worked an engine on the next and carmen did brake work on the far side. Fiber released by any one of them was breathed by all of them. Keep in mind that this bystander pathway means the trade someone held is a poor proxy for their exposure.

Cleanup deserves specific mention. Accumulated insulation debris and brake dust were swept dry and, frequently, blown out with compressed air. Both re-suspend settled fiber efficiently, and both were done by laborers who never touched an asbestos product directly.

For instance, occupations that recur in railroad exposure histories include boilermakers, machinists, pipefitters and steamfitters, carmen, electricians, sheet-metal workers, welders, laborers and sweepers, hostlers, engineers, firemen, conductors, brakemen, and maintenance-of-way crews.

This is the point that distinguishes railroad work from every other occupational exposure covered on this site, and it is worth understanding before anything else.

Most injured workers in the United States are covered by state workers' compensation. That system is no-fault, so the worker does not prove negligence, but the recovery is limited to a statutory schedule, and in exchange the employer is generally immune from suit.

Railroad employees are not in that system. Congress placed them under the Federal Employers' Liability Act, which makes a common carrier by railroad liable in damages to any employee suffering injury resulting in whole or in part from the negligence of its officers, agents, or employees, or from defects in its equipment or premises. FELA is a negligence statute, and it sits outside the state workers' compensation system that covers most other employment.

The trade is symmetrical. Under FELA you must prove the railroad was negligent, which a compensation claimant would not have to do. In return, you can recover full tort damages, including pain and suffering, and can bring the claim in court.

Note that what is recoverable under FELA in a particular asbestos case turns on the facts of that claim and on the law as it stands when the claim is brought.

Four consequences matter as you evaluate a railroad exposure history.

The employer is a defendant. Unlike a power plant or refinery worker, whose claim against their own employer is usually barred by compensation exclusivity, a railroad worker's claim runs directly against the railroad. That is a substantial difference.

Negligence has to be proved. The case turns on what the railroad knew about asbestos hazards, when it knew it, what protections it provided, and what it warned. That is developed through documents and industry history.

Comparative fault reduces the recovery. FELA cuts damages in proportion to the employee's own negligence, and it restricts the assumption-of-risk defense.

The deadline is federal and it is its own rule. FELA carries its own limitations period, which runs on federal terms while the state rule governs the product claims. Because railroad workers frequently also have claims against the product manufacturers who made the brake shoes, gaskets, packing, and insulation, a single work history can involve two different deadline regimes running at once — a genuine trap, and the main reason a railroad history is worth reviewing early. General deadline principles are covered in statute of limitations in asbestos cases.

Claims against product manufacturers proceed alongside a FELA claim on ordinary product-liability principles, and many of those manufacturers resolved their liabilities through bankruptcy trusts — 60 of which held roughly $37 billion in assets at the time of the GAO's 2011 review.

Railroad employment is better documented than most industrial work of the same era, which helps considerably given that the CDC puts the latency between first exposure and clinical disease at usually 20 to 40 years.

• Railroad Retirement Board records. Railroad workers are covered by the Railroad Retirement Board system, and RRB service records document employer and years of covered service. This is usually the strongest starting point and is specific to this industry.
• Railroad personnel and seniority records. Craft, seniority date, and assignments, where preserved through the mergers that consolidated most US railroads.
• Union records. Membership and craft records from the operating and shop-craft unions.
• Shop and facility histories. Which locomotives and equipment a given shop handled, and when.
• Co-worker testimony. Often the only source for which brands of brake shoe, gasket, packing, and insulation were actually in use in a particular shop. Names of anyone still living should be written down now.

Keep in mind that railroad consolidation means the entity that employed someone decades ago frequently no longer exists under that name. Successor railroads commonly inherited the liabilities along with the track, so this is usually a records problem and a surmountable one.

Railroad work leaves a better paper trail than most of the industries on this site, and that works in your favor. Your Railroad Retirement Board service record alone will establish who you worked for and for how long.

We'll pull that history together with you and sort out which deadlines are actually running, since a rail career often has two. That review is free, and there's no fee unless we win. If you'd rather start by simply writing down the shops and yards you remember, that's useful time spent.

It costs nothing to find out where your family stands.