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7/1/2022
The American Short Line and Regional Railroad Association this week announced it awarded a record number of Jake Safety Awards for 2021 at 364, including 20 that are recognized as President’s Safety Award winners.
The program recognizes short lines for above-industry average safety performance in 2021.
Of the 364 Jake Award recipients, 332 will be honored “with distinction” for achieving Federal Railroad Administration-reportable injury-free performance in 2021. For the second year in a row, a record number of railroads earned the distinction, up from 316 in 2020 and 278 in 2019.
"Our short-line members are doing their part to continue to drive those statistics in the right direction, placing safety above all competing priorities,” said ASLRRA President Chuck Baker in a press release. "The short line industry average safety incident rate has dropped once again to 2.17 reportable incidents per 200,000 person-hours worked."
To be honored with a Jake Award, an ASLRRA member must perform better than the industry average reportable injury frequency rate for railroads other than Class Is, commuter railroads and Amtrak based on data reported to the FRA during the calendar year, and must have completed all FRA-required employee-on-duty reporting for 2021.
The ASLRRA also bestows President's Safety Awards to regionals and short lines that post the lowest reportable injury frequency rate per FRA regulations as measured within person-hour categories. For 2021, the association presented President's awards to five railroads in the Central, Eastern, Pacific and Southern regions in categories ranging from less than 50,000 to more than 500,000 person-hours worked.
The full list of Jake Safety and President's Safety award winners is accessible at this link. The ASLRRA will present the awards at its regional meetings in fall.
Named for the late Lowell "Jake" Jacobsen, who was the longtime president and general manager of the Copper Basin Railway, the program has distributed nearly 6,600 Jake and Jake with Distinction Awards. Jacobson — who died in July 2021 — created a short-line safety award program in 1993 and the ASLRRA Safety Committee adopted it in 1999.