Coordinating With Railroads in Your Jurisdiction: A Comms and EMA Guide

Why pre-incident coordination matters

Most departments treat the railroad the way they treat a large private property owner: something that sits inside the jurisdiction, that they will deal with when they have to, and that they rarely think about otherwise. That works right up until the day it does not. A grade crossing collision, a derailment, a car on fire in a yard, or a person struck on the tracks all put you into direct operational contact with an organization you may never have spoken to.

The problem is that rail incidents are unlike almost anything else you run. The hazard can be a mile long. It can carry materials you cannot see and were not told about. It sits on a corridor where your normal access points, hydrants, and staging areas may not exist. And critically, the thing you most need to happen in the first minutes, stopping other train traffic on that line, is something only the railroad can do. You cannot do it yourself, and you cannot do it by standing on the tracks and waving.

Pre-incident coordination is simply the recognition that all of this is knowable in advance. The contacts exist. The location systems exist. The notification procedures exist. If you learn them before the incident, the incident becomes a phone call and a plan. If you learn them during the incident, you are improvising against a clock.

How railroad communications actually work

The single most important thing for a responder to understand is that a railroad is its own self-contained communications world. Operating railroads run their own radio systems, their own dispatching centers, and their own control of train movement. Trains talk to railroad dispatchers, not to your dispatch. The people who can actually stop or slow a train, reroute traffic, or cut power to an electrified line are railroad employees sitting in a railroad operations center, often nowhere near your district.

This has a few practical consequences that surprise responders the first time:

• You generally cannot talk directly to a train crew on your radios. Railroad radio channels are their operational system, and you are not on it. Even where responders technically could monitor, keying up to a crew is not how movement gets stopped.
• The way you stop trains is by reaching the railroad's operations or dispatch center and asking them to do it. That request goes through the railroad's own chain, and they relay it to the crews and to the signaling system.
• Your incident commander and the railroad's operations center need a voice-to-voice link. That link is a phone call to a number the railroad maintains, not a shared talkgroup.

None of this means the railroad is uncooperative. In practice they very much want that call, because an uncontrolled scene on their line is their problem too. It means the pathway is different from the mutual-aid and interoperable radio habits you are used to. Your job in the first minutes is not to get on their frequency. It is to get the railroad's operations center on the phone and tell them what you have.

The emergency notification number and crossing location data

Here is the piece that saves the most time, and the piece most crews have never been briefed on. Railroads maintain emergency notification numbers that let responders and the public report a problem and request that trains be stopped. In many places that number, along with a crossing identifier, is posted right at the grade crossing itself, typically on or near the crossing signal equipment or a nearby sign. It is there on purpose, for exactly this moment.

Two things live together at that crossing, and both matter:

• The emergency notification number. This is your fast line to the railroad's operations center to report an incident, a stalled vehicle, a signal malfunction, a trespasser, or any hazard on the tracks, and to ask that trains be stopped on that line.
• The crossing identifier and location data. Grade crossings carry an assigned crossing number, and rail lines are measured by mileposts. When you call, the railroad locates you by that crossing number or by the line and milepost, not by your street address. Reading them the posted crossing number is often the single fastest way to tell them exactly where the hazard is on their system.

Train your first-arriving personnel and your dispatchers to look for and read back that information. When a caller or a unit reports a stalled vehicle on the tracks, the crossing number and the notification number should be the very next things you capture. Getting that stop request in early is not just about the incident in front of you. It is about the train you cannot see yet that is already on the way.

Because those numbers matter so much, do not rely on someone squinting at a sign in the dark under stress. Capture the notification numbers and crossing identifiers for the crossings in your district in your pre-plans, and put them somewhere dispatch and command can pull them in seconds. A crossing number written down in advance is worth more than a perfect radio report.

Hazardous materials by rail and getting consist information

Rail moves freight, and freight includes hazardous materials, sometimes in large quantities and sometimes in a single tank car parked in the middle of a mixed train. From the outside you often cannot tell what a car contains beyond its placards, and placards do not tell you quantities, car-by-car positions, or which cars are involved in a derailment pileup.

The information you want is the train's consist, meaning the list of what is on that train and where each car sits in the lineup, along with the shipping information for any hazardous materials aboard. The railroad has this. Getting it to your hazmat team and your incident commander quickly is one of the most valuable things the railroad does for you during an incident, and it is another reason the operations-center phone link matters so much. When you make contact, asking for the consist and shipping papers for the involved cars should be near the top of your list.

• Report your initial size-up and your best read of placards and car types, but treat that as preliminary. Let the consist confirm what you actually have.
• Ask specifically for the position and contents of the cars involved, not just a general manifest. In a derailment, the order the cars ended up in is not the order they started in.
• Keep your isolation distances and defensive posture conservative until you have real product information in hand. The consist is coming, but your people should not be standing close while they wait for it.

The general point for planning is simple. Assume any train through your district could be carrying something that changes your whole approach, build your rail incident procedures around getting product information fast, and make sure the people who need that information know it comes from the railroad through the same operations-center contact you use to stop the trains.

Building the relationship before the incident

Everything above works far better if it is not the first conversation you have ever had with the railroad. The operating railroads have people whose job includes working with public safety agencies along their lines. Finding that contact and building a working relationship in ordinary time is the highest-value thing you can do.

A few concrete moves pay off:

• Identify and record your railroad contacts. Get the emergency notification numbers for the lines in your district, and get the name and contact information for the railroad's public safety or community liaison. Store both where command and dispatch can reach them, not in one person's phone.
• Build pre-plans for your rail lines and yards. Map the crossings with their crossing numbers, the mileposts, the access points, the places apparatus can and cannot reach the right of way, staging areas, water supply, and any yards or sidings. Note where a train can be a long time getting cleared and where a blocked crossing cuts your district in half.
• Ask about joint training. Railroads frequently support training for responders on rail safety, tank car familiarization, and incident coordination. Some run programs specifically for fire and EMS. Take them up on it, and get your crews and your neighboring departments through it together.
• Walk the line. A daylight tour of your yards and crossings with a railroad representative teaches your officers more than any document. It also puts faces to the phone numbers you will be dialing at three in the morning.

The relationship also solves a quieter problem. Rail infrastructure changes. Crossings get rebuilt, sidings get added, traffic patterns shift. A live contact and a periodic tour keep your pre-plans from going stale, and stale rail pre-plans are worse than none because they read as authoritative while being wrong.

Grade crossing incidents and pedestrian strikes

Not every rail call is a derailment. The everyday rail incidents are grade crossing collisions, stalled or stuck vehicles on the tracks, and trespasser or pedestrian strikes along the right of way. These are frequent, they are dangerous to responders, and they carry a hard truth: a train cannot stop the way a truck can. By the time a crew sees a problem ahead, the physics may already be decided. That is exactly why the notification number exists, and why getting the stop request in early can matter even when the immediate scene looks static.

For crossing and trespasser incidents, a few communications principles hold:

• Stop the trains first, then work the scene. Whether it is a stalled vehicle, a patient on the tracks, or crews that need to operate on or near the rails, your first move is the notification number and the request to stop rail traffic on that line. Do not put people on the tracks on the assumption that nothing is coming.
• Confirm the stop before committing personnel. Requesting a stop and having it confirmed are two different things. Where your operation depends on the line being clear, get confirmation from the railroad, and keep a spotter regardless.
• Locate precisely. Crossing numbers and mileposts are how the railroad finds you along miles of track where there are no addresses. A struck pedestrian a quarter mile from the nearest crossing is a location problem before it is a patient-care problem. Reference the nearest crossing number and describe direction and distance along the line.
• Plan for the second victim and the psychological load. Pedestrian strikes are hard on crews and often on the train crew as well. Fold critical incident support into how you manage these calls, and coordinate with the railroad, whose employees are victims of these events too.

Folding the railroad into your EMA and mutual-aid planning

A significant rail incident will not stay inside one department. A derailment with hazardous materials can pull in mutual aid, hazmat teams, EMS, law enforcement, public works, environmental and health agencies, evacuation and shelter operations, and public information demands, all at once. That is emergency management territory, and the railroad belongs in that planning from the start.

Some ways to build them in:

• Name the railroad in your emergency operations plan. Treat the operating railroad as a defined response partner with a role, contacts, and expected capabilities, the same way you would treat a utility or a neighboring jurisdiction. Their operations center is a stakeholder you notify, not a vendor you happen to call.
• Solve the interoperability gap on paper first. Since you cannot share their operational radio channels, decide in advance how command and the railroad will maintain a voice link during a long incident, who owns that phone line, and how information flows into your unified command structure.
• Include rail scenarios in your exercises. When you run tabletop or full-scale exercises, work a rail incident and invite the railroad to the table. It surfaces the coordination gaps in the room instead of on the tracks.
• Brief mutual-aid partners on the same procedures. The department three towns over may be the one that arrives first at a crossing on your shared line. If they do not know about the notification number and the consist process, your coordination breaks at the boundary. Standardize the rail response approach across your mutual-aid region so any responding unit works it the same way.
• Plan for the blocked-crossing problem. A stopped or derailed train can sever your district's road network for hours. That is a routing and access problem for every other call you catch during the incident, and it needs to be in your EMA planning, not discovered live.

The unifying idea is that rail coordination is not one call type. It is a standing relationship and a set of procedures that touch operations, EMA, mutual aid, and public information. Build it once, keep it current, and it holds up whether the incident is a single stalled car or a full corridor emergency.

A starter checklist

If you have rail in your jurisdiction and you are starting close to zero, here is a simple sequence to get you to a defensible baseline.

• Inventory the rail in your district. List every line, yard, siding, and grade crossing. Record each crossing's crossing number and the line milepost where you can.
• Collect the emergency notification numbers for the lines through your district and store them where dispatch and command can reach them instantly. Do not depend on the posted sign at the scene.
• Find your railroad contact. Identify the railroad's public safety or community liaison for your area and get their name and number into your plan.
• Build rail pre-plans. Crossings, mileposts, access points, staging, water supply, yards, and the spots where a blocked crossing splits your district.
• Write a one-page rail incident checklist. First move: call the notification number, report location by crossing number or milepost, request the stop. Then: request consist and shipping information for involved cars, set conservative isolation, post a spotter.
• Train every first responder on the core idea: you do not talk to the train, you call the railroad, and you locate by crossing number and milepost.
• Ask about joint training and a line tour, and get your mutual-aid partners into it with you.
• Put the railroad in your EMA plan as a named response partner and work a rail scenario into your next exercise.
• Review it on a schedule. Rail infrastructure and contacts change. Re-verify numbers, crossings, and liaisons at a set interval so your plan does not quietly go out of date.

None of this requires special funding or new equipment. It requires phone calls, a few tours, and the discipline to write down what you learn so it survives past the officer who learned it. That is the whole game with rail coordination. The information is out there and the railroad wants you to have it. The departments that do well are simply the ones that gathered it before the night they needed it.