Talk to a FELA lawyer about your railroad claim

There is no charge for the review by phone or through the short form. The call might be recorded so the attorney's office keeps an accurate account of your work background. The reviewer will ask about:

1. Which railroads employed you, and during which years.
2. The job titles you held.
3. The yards, shops, or lines you worked in.
4. Your diagnosis, plus when a doctor first said it might relate to work.

Those details make it easier for the office to assess the claim. A railroad rule or contract cannot legally stop your coworkers from freely sharing what they know about your injury or illness.

They hold the railroad to account. Most American workers get state workers' compensation, but railroad workers do not. FELA is the law that makes the railroad pay workers who were hurt or made sick on the job, and a FELA lawyer builds that case.

The railroad has to pay if its carelessness played any part in your injury or illness, even a small one. Negligence means the railroad, its officers, agents, or employees did not use reasonable care. A claim may include care costs, wages already lost and expected later, plus pain and suffering.

FELA reaches nearly every interstate railroad, such as freight lines, Amtrak, and most commuter systems. It leaves out the Alaska Railroad and railroads that operate solely within a company-owned plant.

The railroad's negligence does not have to be the only cause of your injury; it only needs to have played a part, however small. The jury can hear the case if railroad negligence had any role, however small, in what happened. The Supreme Court affirmed that rule in 2011.

Even if you were partly at fault, you can still recover. The jury just lowers the award to match your share of the blame. The law also says you are not considered to have accepted job risks when the railroad's carelessness led to the injury.

Yes. The Supreme Court ruled in 1949 that FELA includes occupational diseases like silicosis, not just sudden accidents. An occupational disease is an illness built up by workplace exposures over time.

Cancer often appears long after the exposure, sometimes after the worker has already left railroad employment. That is why federal injury reports seldom capture it. Most work-related cancers never show up in those FRA injury reports, so a missing report does not mean there is no claim. A claim does not rise or fall on whether the railroad filed a report.

Exposures outside the railroad don't automatically sink your claim. In one asbestosis case, the jury was told not to reduce compensation for exposures outside railroad work if railroad dust also contributed to the disease, even slightly. That decision also let a worker with asbestosis recover for a real and serious fear of later cancer.

A FELA lawsuit has to be filed within three years. With an illness that develops slowly, the period starts when you knew, or reasonably should have known, that work might be connected.

This cutoff can end otherwise valid claims. In January 2026, one New Jersey appeals court agreed that a car inspector's bladder cancer claim had to be dismissed. In May 2014, his doctor said the cancer was tied to the air he had been breathing on the job. He brought his case in April 2019, so the claims based on the cancer as it stood in 2014 came too late.

If a doctor has already linked your illness to railroad work, your three years may already be running, so call today for a free review.

If a railroad worker has died, the personal representative brings the claim for the surviving spouse and children. When there is no spouse or child, the benefit goes to the parents, and after them to dependent next of kin. That representative is the person legally appointed to manage the worker's estate. Call today for a free review with a law firm that handles railroad workers' FELA claims.