Well, howdy there internet people, it's Bow again.

So today we are going to talk about the Railway Safety Act of 2023.

And what's in it and how there's a little link to history in it, very recent history,

and how sometimes it might just be better to listen to people.

Okay, so the good news.

It does appear that at least some in Congress are willing to impose some new regulations and try to make things

safer when it comes to the railways. There is a group of six senators, it's

bipartisan and in addition to those six, it looks like Schumer,

just like immediately endorsed it.

Haven't heard anything from the house yet, but this looks like

something that will probably go through, we hope, at least in some fashion.

So what's in it? It raises the fines for railway companies that don't follow

the rules basically. It adds a whole bunch of

new safety regulations dealing with everything from blocked crossings to detection equipment.

It requires railways to provide advance notice

to state emergency agencies as they move through, which to be honest, I mean that's cool and everything, but with the

amount of rail traffic that exists, the odds are that those are going to be pretty much ignored. I like the idea but I don't

know that that's going to do a whole lot of good. There's also going to be new rules about the size

and weight of the cars, of the trains. I wonder if that means they're going to limit the amount of cars on individual trains.

There's also some regulations about a minimum time that inspectors are going to spend performing safety inspections on cars.

And all of this combined should make things,

should make things better.

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