In 2005, the US required reflective markings on freight cars to improve visibility at crossings; nearly 1 in 4 crossing collisions involved vehicles hitting trains

Late-night driving on highways near railroad tracks involves a particular kind of danger: a freight train parked at a crossing or moving at a slow walk, vanishing into the blackness. It is the kind of accident that happens more often than people think; in fact, it was a significant contributor to highway-rail grade crossing collisions in the United States. According to the Federal Railroad Administration, almost a quarter of all highway-rail grade collision incidents in the United States involved vehicles running into trains that had already occupied the crossings. This is why federal authorities amended the rules for the appearance of freight cars in January 2005.

What was the issue

The issue was that trains were surprisingly hard to see, though they weighed more than a hundred tons each. A freight car’s dark color usually rendered it invisible to the drivers on the road until it was too late. Freight cars were traditionally painted in dark, inexpensive industrial colors like black, boxcar red, and similar mineral-oxide tones, chosen mainly for their low cost and their ability to hide soot, rust stains, and weathering, not for any deliberate light-absorbing design. A combination of nighttime driving and the absence of artificial lighting on many rural roads made these dark-colored trains especially hard for drivers to spot at railway crossings. This problem was recognized and studied extensively before the new regulations were enacted.


The science behind the strips

The technical details of the reflectors were worked out through extensive experimentation. In the 1990s, the staff of the Volpe National Transportation Systems Center tested various materials designed to make the presence of trains known to the drivers at night. The findings, published in the form of a U.S. Department of Transportation technical paper titled “Freight Car Reflectorization,” confirmed that microprismatic retroreflective material was a good candidate for long-term durability on rolling stock, while being easily visible to drivers from a considerable distance. This property, among others, contributed to the reflectorization becoming obligatory for all railroads by the federal authorities.

The rule itself was not very complicated: it required the railroad companies to put yellow or white reflective strips on either side of all freight cars and locomotives. They had to be placed near both ends and at intervals of no more than 12 feet from each other, with additional reflective markings for the locomotives. The rules gave railroad companies until 2010 to fit locomotives with the material and until 2015 to fit freight cars, the reverse of what earlier reporting on this rule often states. (Passenger cars were excluded from the rule, since their interior lighting already makes them easy to see at night.)

Did it actually work?

The debate about the effectiveness of the new rules is still ongoing, since it is notoriously difficult to single out one factor: the reflectorization that contributed to the decline in accidents. There were other changes that improved the situation: statistics from Operation Lifesaver show that the number of crossing collisions declined sharply between 1972 and 2025, from roughly 12,000 to about 2,270 incidents per year. That decline reflects a combination of factors: better crossing technology, public-education campaigns, and grade-separation projects, alongside reflectorization. Nevertheless, it is safe to say that the new regulations were helpful: highway-rail crossing collisions still kill several hundred people a year in the US, even though they now account for well under 1 percent of total U.S. traffic fatalities (FRA and NHTSA data put total annual road deaths at roughly 40,000, against roughly 250–300 crossing deaths): a reminder that even a small share of a very large number is a serious ongoing safety concern.

When looking at the rules from the perspective of the general public, one might say that they are examples of effective legislation. They were the result of months of experimentation and work by teams of engineers, who then had to update the technical specifications to reflect the findings. The new rules then had to be communicated clearly to the railroads and motorists who needed to adjust to them, not to train passengers, who were never affected by a rule aimed at helping drivers see freight cars from the outside. All of this served to improve the visibility of trains by adding reflective stripes to the parts of the cars most likely to be seen by the drivers, which in turn reduced the number of collisions. Next time you are on a highway near a railroad crossing, try to look at the dots on the sides of the boxcars: remember that they were visible to the scientists who worked on the improvement of railroad crossing safety and that they got there after years of hard work by the engineers and technicians.