Cancer in railroad conductors and engineers

By law, railroads must tell the Federal Railroad Administration about injuries and illnesses that happen on duty. Across the 17 railroads tracked on this site, these job titles generated 6,049 reports from 2021 to 2025, including 364 occupational illnesses and 41 cases of noise-related hearing loss.

Conductors and yard crews often work around diesel locomotives, in yards as well as on the road, and federal labor data puts conductors and yardmasters among the jobs with the highest rates of injury and illness.

Cancer rarely shows up in these filings because it often appears years after the exposure, sometimes after retirement. Most work-related cancers never show up in those FRA injury reports, so a missing report does not mean there is no claim. A small FRA number does not prove a small risk.

The answer is yes, says IARC, the World Health Organization's cancer agency. The agency's experts unanimously concluded that diesel exhaust causes lung cancer. They also found a possible link to bladder cancer, but the evidence for that link was limited. IARC had already called it a probable cause in 1988.

Engineers work in the locomotive cab, shift after shift. They run diesel-electric engines, work the throttle and air brakes, and check fuel, sand, water and the mechanical condition before every run. Roughly 81 percent of engineers said they worked inside an enclosed cab every day, amid loud noise and steady vibration once the train is moving.

The exhaust is the hazard. Its particles can be inhaled deep into the lungs, bringing cancer-causing compounds with them, and a review of more than 35 studies of workers around diesel exhaust put the added lung cancer risk at 20 to 50 percent. By 1959, diesels made up 95 percent of US locomotives, up from 10 percent in 1946.

The long-term railroad study counted brakemen among four diesel-exposed job groups, together with engineers, firemen, and conductors. Brake operators join and separate train cars, and some travel with the train crew.

In that study, people who spent more years in train-operating jobs did not show a steadily higher lung cancer risk. The authors still concluded that diesel exhaust contributed to lung cancer deaths in these workers.

Under FELA, a railroad is responsible for an employee's injury or death when the railroad's negligence contributes in whole or in part. In Urie v. Thompson in 1949, the Supreme Court ruled that this includes slow occupational diseases, not just accidents, so cancer tied to long-term exhaust exposure can qualify.

A FELA claim still requires proof that the railroad was negligent and that its negligence played some part, however small, in causing the illness. The Supreme Court has said a jury can hear the case if the railroad's negligence played any part, even the smallest, in causing the illness (Rogers v. Missouri Pacific, 1957), and it repeated that standard in CSX v. McBride in 2011. A worker who shares some fault can still recover; the jury simply reduces the award to match that portion of fault.

If you or someone you love has a cancer diagnosis, the timing matters, because FELA gives you three years to file. For a slowly developing disease, the Supreme Court has said the clock starts when the accumulated effects of exposure become apparent, rather than when the exposure happened. The deadline is firm. In an unpublished January 2026 opinion, a New Jersey appeals court ruled that a car inspector had missed the deadline for claims concerning his bladder cancer as it existed in 2014. The diagnosis came in May 2014, his doctor tied it to his work then, and he waited until April 2019, almost five years later.

If the worker dies, the claim passes to the personal representative for the benefit of the spouse and children left behind. Coworkers may still choose to share what they know when a worker is sick or has died; any railroad rule or contract that tries to block that is void under federal law.