In the past decade, America's freight rail companies have become zealots for efficiency. Trains are longer, and they don't stop as often. Unprofitable customers are gone. Scheduling is meticulous. Nearly 60,000 jobs disappeared since 2015. The companies' stock prices and profitability have surged. Still, derailments are at historic lows. But the East Palestine accident has shown how deficient the industry has been when it comes to investing in upgrades. Many trains still rely on a Civil War-era braking system, and they aren't using the latest detectors that experts say could have caught the deteriorating bearing months before that fateful day.

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Some of the proposed solutions would require significant capex.

At the last AM, management was asked about BNSF being less cost efficient than competitors by not adopting Precision Scheduling. Abel's response supporting BNSF practices received quite a bit of criticism and contrasted unfavorably with Jain's about Geico failing to match Progressive on telematics. Maybe BNSF's decisions to forego some efficiencies were right after all.

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