Having had the privilege of working with a railroad this year, I have learned a lot about how “safety” functions in an industry sector I knew absolutely nothing about. But in this time, I have come to really like the Federal Railroad Administration’s (FRA) approach to managing safety across this industry. The FRA had to pass a rule to meet a mandate from the Rail Safety Improvement Act of 2008 (RSIA) and they took a playbook from OSHA/EPA process safety standards. The final rule requires the nation’s largest freight railroads, known as Class I, to each DEVELOP and IMPLEMENT an FRA-approved Risk Reduction Plan (RRP). These comprehensive, system-oriented safety plans are required to identify and analyze hazards and their associated risks and develop and implement plans to eliminate or mitigate those risks. An RRP is designed to improve operational safety, complementing a railroad’s adherence to all other applicable FRA regulations. Each railroad must tailor an RRP for its individual operations, and the RRP must reflect the substantive facts on any hazards associated with each railroads’ operations.