One employee watching 19,500 miles of track could have prevented Norfolk Southern Corp.'s February train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, but he says he was distracted by other trains and failed to see  warnings that a wheel bearing was heating up and would fail, reports Darrel Rowland of ABC News: "He wasn't even looking at the readings from defect detectors along the tracks on the bearing, suspected by the National Transportation Safety Board of causing the fiery crash in East Palestine."

Gary Rambo, automatic train-control analyst for the Atlanta-based railroad, told NTSB investigators "he was monitoring other Norfolk Southern trains at the same time," Rowland reports. "Thus, he didn't notice a 'trending alert' from the wayside defect detector showing a spike of 103 degrees in the bearing of doomed train 32N in Ohio. . . . He said, 'Honestly, I didn't see it when it first came in. There were three other trains I was working on.'"

Read the full article about rail safety by Heather Close at The Rural Blog.