Not denying there was recently a large derailment that caused an environmental hazard, but it seems an idea against trains and rail safety is being pushed. The amount of people injured/impacted by trains still is tiny compared to truck freighting.

The idea here is that they are reasonably safe, and when things do go wrong, it's not necessarily due to lack of safety measures. Most of these are human error, on a small scale.

Literally half the data here is from a "watchdog" group that studies rail safety.

Data collected from the US DOT Federal Railroad Administration and Operation Lifesaver

https://oli.org/track-statistics

https://railroads.dot.gov/accident-and-incident-reporting/train-accident-reports/train-accidents-cause

I used Excel to created the trend line graph and pie chart after cleaning up the data to be more clear and condensed. Items combined and finished in Adobe Illustrator. Some of the categories for the pie chart were combined/reworded to fit the infographic, but the main cause is still conveyed accurately in my opinion.

Quick note about the derailment pie chart: The majority of the reasons are categorized as “other”, but these were hundreds of reasons with little occurrences each. I included all of the major reasons as labeled amounts, and also cherry picked the vandalism statistic as that was something I thought some people were curious about. I do want to make note: vandalism is not the next lowest cause after ‘motorist deliberately caused” category, I simply wanted to make sure the percentage for that was actually shown.