Asbestos Exposure in Railroad Work

If you worked for the railroad — or if someone in your family did — and a mesothelioma, lung cancer, asbestosis, or other asbestos diagnosis has now come in, this page is the place to start. The same dust reached the spouses and children who washed the work clothes, and it didn't matter whether the worker was a machinist, a boilermaker, a car man, or an engineer, because the locomotives and the shops that maintained them were built and lagged with asbestos.

The railroad job with the heaviest asbestos exposure was tearing the insulation off a steam locomotive. A single locomotive boiler was wrapped in roughly three tons of asbestos block and cement, and when it came into the backshop for an overhaul, the crews stripped all of it off by hand and blew the residue down with air hoses, filling the shop with what one witness called a snow storm of dust that settled over everyone working the floor. None of that dust stayed with the crew that made it: asbestos fibers are light enough to hang in the air for hours and drift across a shop, so the machinist at the next bench and the laborer sweeping up breathed it too. That bystander exposure was significant: even twenty feet from active work the air put roughly a month of ordinary city background through the lungs in a quarter hour. The lagging was only the worst of it; the brakes, the packing, the pipe covering, and even the boxcars that hauled raw asbestos across the country all carried the same fiber. The chart below shows fifteen minutes of three backshop jobs against a year of ordinary city air.

Even ordinary city air carries a faint trace of asbestos, from natural mineral erosion and a century of industrial use, and that trace is the yardstick the chart measures against.

What these numbers mean. Asbestos in air is measured in fibers per cubic centimeter (f/cc), a unit that hides how dangerous a task was. Across this site we translate each measurement into fibers breathed, feet of fiber end to end, and years of ordinary city air, using conservative, government-sourced assumptions. See how we measure asbestos in air for the method and its limits.

You don't need to remember which company made the lagging or the brake shoes, and you don't need old job records or a service history in hand. Railroad workers also have a legal path most workers don't: because railroads are interstate commerce, a railroad worker's claim against the railroad runs under a federal law written specifically for railroad workers, not the state workers' compensation system, and it lets you hold the railroad directly accountable. If you can say "I worked the backshop at the rail yard" or "my father was a boilermaker for the railroad for thirty years," we have a starting point.

Why the locomotives and the shops were full of asbestos

A steam locomotive was a boiler on wheels, running at high pressure and high heat, and the boiler had to be insulated to work at all. For most of the twentieth century that meant asbestos block and cement, and the railroads specified exactly what they wanted: surviving purchase specifications from the 1930s through the 1970s call out asbestos boiler lagging, asbestos cement, asbestos welding paper, and asbestos car cement by fiber content. By 1923 Johns-Manville was already publishing a catalog written specifically for railroads, placing its locomotive lagging, pipe insulation, cements, packing, and brake materials in every part of the railroad. The railroads wrote asbestos into their purchasing specs and bought it by the carload.

The locomotive boiler lagging was most often chrysotile (white asbestos), the most common form, combined with magnesia into the block and cement that wrapped the boiler. Certain packing and gasket materials brought some amphibole (a more hazardous fiber type) into the shops. The lagging jobs with chrysotile were, by volume, the largest asbestos exposure in the whole industry, and they produced some of the earliest railroad mesotheliomas in the medical record. The mesothelioma epidemiology is documented on our mesothelioma research page.

And the work that maintained the locomotives is what put the fiber in the air, in a sequence that pulled in the whole shop. When a steam locomotive came into the backshop for an overhaul, the crews stripped the tons of old lagging off the boiler by hand, and the tear-out threw chunks of dry, degraded asbestos down into the pits and filled the air with what witnesses described as a snow storm of dust. Sheet-metal workers pulled the tin jacketing, insulators ripped out the block and blew the residue off with compressed air, boilermakers made their repairs in the cloud, insulators re-lagged the boiler, the sheet-metal crews closed it back up, and painters blew off the last of the fiber with air hoses. Every craft in the shop breathed the same dusty air. The men often did it bare-faced and went home in dusty clothes to their families, while the companies that made the products, and the railroads that specified them, knew what the dust was doing.

Where the asbestos was, from the backshop to the boxcar

A railroad worker's exposure depended on the craft and where it was done. Here's the tour.

• The backshop and the roundhouse. The heart of the exposure. This is where locomotives were torn down and rebuilt, where the boiler lagging came off and went back on, and where the whole crew relay happened in one dust-filled building. Machinists, boilermakers, sheet-metal workers, pipefitters, insulators, and their helpers worked the locomotives here, overhaul after overhaul, for entire careers.
• The running trades. Engineers, firemen, and hostlers worked on and around the locomotives in service, in cabs insulated with asbestos and behind boilers lagged with it, breathing what shed off the hot, worked material as they ran the trains.
• The brakes. Every piece of rolling stock stopped on asbestos. Brake shoes and linings on locomotives and cars were ground, beveled, and blown out during service and repair, and the brake dust was a daily exposure for car men, machinists, and anyone maintaining the fleet. See how asbestos brake and friction products caused exposure.
• The car department. Passenger cars and cabooses were insulated for heat and sound with asbestos, their steam-heat lines were lagged and taped, and car men cut, fit, and tore out that material as cars were built, repaired, and scrapped. Sealing and glazing compounds, floor materials, and cements added more.
• The track, signal, and electrical side. Diesel locomotives brought their own asbestos, in gaskets, arc chutes, wire coverings, and heat shields that the railroads' own records show in use into the 1980s, and signal and electrical crews handled asbestos board and insulation in the equipment.
• The boxcars that hauled the fiber. The railroads carried most of the millions of tons of asbestos ever mined in this country, and the men who loaded, hauled, and cleaned out those cars worked in the dust of raw fiber that leaked from bags and lingered in the cars long after the load was gone.

Two things multiplied the exposure. The shop work concentrated the dust of a whole crew onto one locomotive in an enclosed building, and the work repeated for a career: a career machinist or boilermaker tore down and rebuilt locomotives, and breathed the lagging, over and over across thirty or forty years.

How a railroad case gets paid

A railroad worker's case is built differently from almost any other asbestos case, because railroad work is governed by its own federal laws. Where most workers are limited to state workers' compensation against their employer, a railroad worker can sue the railroad directly, and that changes everything about how the case comes together.

• The FELA claim against the railroad. The Federal Employers' Liability Act (FELA) is a federal law written specifically for railroad workers. Instead of the limited, no-fault payments of state workers' compensation, FELA lets an injured railroad worker sue the railroad directly for failing to provide a safe workplace, with no cap on what can be recovered for medical costs, lost income, and pain and suffering. And it uses a comparative-fault rule: even if the worker is found partly responsible for his own exposure, that reduces the recovery rather than barring it. For a railroad family, this is usually the center of the case.
• The Boiler Inspection Act. A second federal law strengthens many locomotive cases. Because federal law required locomotives and their parts to be safe to operate, a railroad that ran locomotives insulated and equipped with asbestos can be held liable without the worker having to prove the railroad was careless in the ordinary sense. The railroads' own purchasing specifications, which called out asbestos lagging and cement by name, are part of what shows they knew what they were putting into the shops.
• Product claims against the makers. Alongside the case against the railroad, the companies that made the lagging, brakes, gaskets, packing, and pipe covering can be reached separately. Many are now bankrupt and pay through asbestos trusts, which are paper claims requiring no lawsuit; some are still in business and can be sued directly. The makers behind each product, and which of their trusts pay today, are laid out on the product pages. See the makers behind asbestos pipe and block insulation, and the makers behind asbestos brake and friction products.
• Federal and disability benefits. Railroad workers have their own federal retirement and disability system, and Social Security disability may apply as well, both paid alongside the FELA and product recovery. How asbestos disability and benefit claims work.

The FELA claim has its own federal deadline, which generally runs three years from when the worker knew or should have known that the illness was related to the railroad work, and other deadlines can depend on your state. Some of these clocks are short, which is why it's worth calling promptly rather than waiting. Find your state's asbestos deadlines.

The railroads, and the shops where the work was done

For a railroad worker's case, where the work happened tells us which products were in the shops and on the locomotives during which years, and it identifies the railroad that answers for the conditions. The exposure happened across the whole system:

• The big backshops and locomotive works, where heavy overhauls and rebuilds concentrated the lagging and rebuild work, run by the major railroads and their locomotive builders.
• The roundhouses and running-repair shops at division points and terminals across the country, where locomotives were serviced between runs.
• The car shops and yards, where passenger cars, cabooses, and freight cars were built, repaired, and scrapped.

The railroads employed hundreds of thousands of workers across many large and small companies, and almost all of the old railroad companies have since merged, been absorbed, or been reorganized into today's railroads. A claim doesn't depend on your railroad still existing under its old name; a successor company usually carries the liability, and part of what we do is trace which company answers for a given railroad and era. If your road or shop isn't the kind of famous name people recognize, that means nothing about your claim; our exposure database reaches far beyond the big systems.

What the asbestos trade press said about the railroads

The asbestos industry's own trade journal, Asbestos, wrote about the railroads for sixty years. Its notices were written to sell products, not to warn anyone. Today they help families see what was on the locomotives and in the shops where someone worked.

Locomotive boilers and pipes. In 1919 the magazine said 85% Magnesia "lagged the boilers of the locomotives" that carried American supplies in France (Asbestos, Oct. 1919). Ehret Magnesia Manufacturing Co. sold its 85% Magnesia as "locomotive lagging" in ads through the 1920s (Asbestos, Jan. 1923). In 1929 it reported that more locomotives being built and reconditioned had created "a very large demand for magnesia" (Asbestos, Dec. 1929).

Removable asbestos mattresses were used on locomotive boilers. A 1921 article said they had been applied to locomotives "all over the world," and that this lagging was "frequently removed and replaced" for annual inspections (Asbestos, Dec. 1921).
How the shop men did it. Where pipe covering wouldn't fit, "railroads and locomotive builders" wrapped asbestos listing, a narrow tape, around locomotive steam pipes at the bends (Asbestos, Oct. 1919). Unarco said its INSUTAPE asbestos tape, made from 1922 for "hard-to-get-at" pipes on steam locomotives, won "almost universal acceptance among railroads" (Asbestos, Sept. 1971).

In 1940 the Reading Company described how apprentices in its Reading, Pa., shops insulated a model locomotive. They wrapped the boiler barrel in three layers of asbestos tape and covered part of the firebox with sheet asbestos: about 200 feet of tape in all (Asbestos, Jan. 1940).

Cars, cabs and brakes. Unarco patented a locomotive cab curtain woven with asbestos threads (Asbestos, Apr. 1939) and registered a trade-mark for asbestos gasket tape "for locomotive front end plates" (Asbestos, May 1941). Keasbey & Mattison made "Locomotive and Car Tape" at Ambler, Pa. (Asbestos, June 1951) and said its asbestos textiles went into "railroad locomotives, rolling stock" (Asbestos, Feb. 1954). In 1959 Westinghouse Air Brake patented a brake shoe made with asbestos fiber "to be used on railway vehicles" (Asbestos, Jan. 1960). Johns-Manville's employee magazine listed "railroad cars and locomotives" among the uses of J-M asbestos friction materials (J-M News Pictorial, July–Aug. 1962). As late as 1977, Lake Asbestos advertised fibre for brake linings in "railway and subway cars" (Asbestos, Feb. 1977).

Selling to the railroads. The suppliers built whole departments to sell to the railroads. Unarco began as a railway supply firm (Asbestos, Sept. 1971). Keasbey & Mattison set up a railroad department in 1930 (Asbestos, Jan. 1931). Johns-Manville's Transportation Department was run by a former Pullman Company general mechanical inspector (Asbestos, Feb. 1943).

If your railroad or shop isn't named here, that doesn't mean it was free of asbestos. These are only the places the trade press happened to write about.

The crafts that worked the railroad

The railroad employed dozens of crafts, and several of them have their own pages, because their exposure followed them across industries. If your loved one's work fits one of these better than it fits "railroad worker," start there:

• Insulators and insulation workers
• Boilermakers
• Pipefitters and plumbers
• Electricians
• All asbestos occupations

For everyone else, the machinists and their helpers, the sheet-metal workers, the car men, the engineers, firemen, and hostlers, the brakemen, and the shop and yard laborers, this page is your page, and the work described above is the exposure story we build the claim on.

When a railroad case goes to court, the railroad and the product makers raise a familiar set of defenses, and none of them is new to us. The short version is that the arguments describe a cleaner, smaller version of the work than the one your loved one actually did, and the evidence answers them. The detail is below for anyone who wants it.

One thing worth knowing up front: the product trust claims are a paper process, with no opposing lawyer, no deposition, and no court. The defenses below come up on the lawsuit side, including the FELA case against the railroad, which is the part of a railroad claim that can actually go before a judge and jury.