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U.S. Department of Transportation U.S. Department of Transportation Icon United States Department of Transportation United States Department of Transportation

Locomotive Event Recorders

Notice of proposed rulemaking (NPRM).

To improve the crashworthiness of railroad locomotive event recorders and to enhance the quality of information available for post- accident investigations, FRA proposes to amend its existing regulations in four major ways: By requiring that new locomotives have event recorders with "hardened" memory modules, proven by a requirement that the memory modules preserve stored data throughout a sequence of prescribed tests; by requiring that new locomotives have an event recorder that collects certain additional types of information; by simplifying standards for inspecting, testing, and maintaining event recorders; and by requiring the phasing out, over a six-year period, of event recorders that use magnetic tape as a data storage medium. FRA is also proposing to revise the definitions contained in the existing regulation to remove the letter designations so that the defined terms are presented in alphabetical order.

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