By Marcell Owens, Owner, McCray Law Firm, PLLC · Houston, Texas
FELA claims for Texas railroad workers are not workers’ compensation claims, and the difference is not a technicality. It changes what you have to prove, what you can recover, how long you have, and which courtroom you end up in.
FELA is the Federal Employers’ Liability Act, codified at 45 U.S.C. §§ 51 through 60. It is the exclusive framework for an injured railroad employee’s claim against the railroad, and it has been since 1908. Under 45 U.S.C. § 51, a railroad carrier engaged in interstate commerce is liable in damages to an employee for injury or death resulting in whole or in part from the negligence of the carrier’s officers, agents, or employees, or from a defect or insufficiency in its cars, engines, appliances, machinery, track, roadbed, works, or other equipment due to the carrier’s negligence.
Read that phrase again: resulting in whole or in part. That is not the ordinary language of tort causation, and it is not an accident.
At McCray Law Firm, we start every railroad injury conversation by explaining the trade the statute makes. FELA asks more of you than workers’ compensation does — you have to prove the railroad was negligent. In exchange, it dismantles the defenses the railroad would otherwise raise and opens the full range of tort damages, including pain and suffering.
Harder to prove. Worth far more to prove.
FELA claims for Texas railroad workers replace workers’ compensation entirely
Most injured workers in Texas operate inside a state system. A railroad employee does not. Congress put railroad workers under a separate federal statute, and the state workers’ compensation framework does not govern the claim.
This surprises injured rail workers constantly, and it surprises them in a costly direction. They expect a benefits process — file a form, receive a schedule of payments, no argument about fault. What FELA gives them instead is a negligence lawsuit. There is no automatic benefit schedule. There is a case.
Which means the first weeks are not administrative. They are evidentiary. We wrote a full side-by-side in our guide to FELA versus workers’ compensation, because a worker who assumes the wrong system loses time in the only period when evidence can still be preserved.
What a FELA claim requires you to prove
A FELA claim is a negligence claim. The core elements are the ones any negligence case has: the railroad owed a duty, it breached that duty, and the breach caused harm.
Where FELA departs from ordinary negligence is in how much causation it demands.
The causation standard is deliberately relaxed
Section 51 imposes liability for injury resulting in whole or in part from the carrier’s negligence. The statute does not require that the railroad’s negligence be the sole cause, or the primary cause, or the closest cause. Any part is enough to reach liability.
This matters enormously in real railroad cases, because railroad injuries almost always have multiple contributing causes. Fatigue and a defective handhold. Poor lighting and an inadequate crew size. A rushed switching move and worn ballast. In a system that required the railroad’s negligence to be the dominant cause, most of those cases would fail. Under Section 51, they do not.
Equipment defects count, when tied to negligence
Section 51 expressly reaches injuries caused by a defect or insufficiency in cars, engines, appliances, machinery, track, roadbed, works, boats, wharves, or other equipment, where that defect is due to the carrier’s negligence. The physical condition of the property is part of the statute, not an afterthought.
Separately, federal law imposes its own equipment requirements. Under 49 U.S.C. § 20701, a railroad carrier may use or allow the use of a locomotive only when the locomotive and its parts and appurtenances are in proper condition and safe to operate without unnecessary danger of personal injury, have been inspected as required, and can withstand every test prescribed by the Secretary of Transportation.
That statutory standard is doing real work in a FELA case, for a reason covered in the next section.
What FELA takes away from the railroad
This is the part injured workers rarely know, and it is the part that makes the statute worth what it is.
Assumption of risk is abolished
Under 45 U.S.C. § 54, the employee is not held to have assumed the risks of employment where the injury resulted from the negligence of the carrier’s officers, agents, or employees, and the employee is not held to have assumed the risk where the carrier violated a statute enacted for the safety of employees.
The railroad cannot defend a case by arguing that railroading is inherently dangerous and you knew it when you took the job. Congress removed that argument more than a century ago.
Dangerous work is not consented-to work.
Contributory negligence reduces, and sometimes does not reduce at all
Under 45 U.S.C. § 53, the fact that the employee was contributorily negligent does not bar recovery. The damages are diminished by the jury in proportion to the amount of negligence attributable to that employee.
That alone is significant — a partial mistake by the worker does not end the claim.
But the provision has a second half that is far more powerful. No employee is held to be guilty of contributory negligence in any case where the violation by the carrier of any statute enacted for the safety of employees contributed to the injury or death.
When a safety statute was violated and that violation contributed to the injury, the worker’s own negligence stops reducing the recovery. Not reduced proportionally. Removed from the calculation.
This is why the equipment and safety standards matter so much, and why the first thing we look for in a serious rail injury is whether a federal safety requirement was violated. Establishing that does not just help liability. It can eliminate the railroad’s best damages argument.
Waivers and releases are void
Under 45 U.S.C. § 55, any contract, rule, regulation, or device whatsoever whose purpose or intent is to enable a common carrier to exempt itself from liability created by FELA is void.
There is a limit worth knowing. The same section allows the carrier to set off against liability any sum it has contributed or paid to insurance, relief benefits, or indemnity for the injury or death. Benefits already paid can be credited. That is different from a release, and it is a reason to be careful about how payments are characterized before a lawyer has reviewed them.
The three-year deadline, and why it is not as generous as it sounds
Under 45 U.S.C. § 56, no action may be maintained under FELA unless commenced within three years from the day the cause of action accrued.
Three years is longer than the two-year period that generally applies to personal injury claims under Texas law. Rail workers hear that and relax. They should not.
Miss the deadline and the claim is gone, regardless of how strong the facts are. And long before that deadline arrives, the practical window closes. Locomotives get repaired and returned to service. Track defects get corrected. Event recorder and download data cycles. Crew members transfer, retire, and stop remembering the specific sequence of a specific move on a specific night. The railroad’s internal investigation happens in the first days, and it happens whether or not you have counsel.
Cumulative injuries — hearing loss, repetitive trauma, exposure conditions that develop over years of service — raise accrual questions that are genuinely complicated and fact-specific. If your condition developed over time rather than in one event, the date your claim accrued is a legal question, not an obvious one. Do not estimate it.
What you can control is the record. Our guide to what to document in a railroad worker injury claim in Texas covers what exists, who holds it, and the federal provision that protects your right to provide information about your own accident.
FELA covers employees, and only employees
One boundary needs to be stated plainly, because getting it wrong wastes months.
FELA governs the claim of a railroad employee against the railroad. It does not govern the claim of a motorist struck at a grade crossing, a pedestrian, a passenger, or a member of the public. Those claims exist, and they can be substantial, but they run on an entirely different framework built around negligence, property conditions, and federal crossing regulation — including the preemption rules at 49 U.S.C. § 20106.
If you were hit at a crossing rather than hurt on duty, the analysis in this article is not yours. Start with our guide to railroad crossing accidents in Texas instead.
Two different statutes. Two different cases.
Where a FELA case is heard, and why that is an advantage
Section 56 gives concurrent jurisdiction to state courts and federal courts. In federal court, the action may be brought in the district of the defendant’s residence, or in the district where the cause of action arose.
And then there is the provision that shapes strategy in every FELA case. Under 28 U.S.C. § 1445(a), a civil action in any state court against a railroad or its receivers or trustees, arising under 45 U.S.C. §§ 51 through 60, may not be removed to any district court of the United States.
In plain terms: if the case is filed in state court, the railroad cannot move it to federal court. Most defendants in most cases can. A railroad facing a FELA claim cannot.
That is a real tactical asset, and it is one reason forum selection deserves attention at the beginning of a case rather than after a complaint is already filed.
What FELA lets you recover
Because FELA is a tort statute rather than a benefits schedule, the damages are tort damages, not a table of scheduled payments.
That generally includes past and future lost wages and lost earning capacity, past and future medical expenses, physical pain and suffering, mental anguish, and physical impairment and disfigurement. What any particular case supports depends on the evidence and the injury, and no article can tell you what a claim is worth.
Section 51 also covers death. When the injury results in the employee’s death, the statute provides for recovery on behalf of the surviving widow or husband and children of the employee; if none, then the employee’s parents; if none, then the next of kin dependent upon the employee.
Note carefully that this is a different beneficiary structure than the one Texas law applies to an ordinary wrongful death claim. Under Section 71.004 of the Texas Civil Practice and Remedies Code, a Texas wrongful death claim is for the exclusive benefit of the surviving spouse, children, and parents, with no provision for dependent next of kin. FELA’s structure is tiered and reaches further in some situations. A family working from general Texas wrongful death information can reach the wrong conclusion about who has a claim, which is why our guides to who can file a wrongful death claim in Texas and wrongful death damages in Texas should be read as the state-law comparison, not as the rule for a rail death.
Two statutes, two lists. Do not assume they match.
What we do in the first weeks of a rail injury case
- We send preservation demands immediately — for the locomotive and equipment, event recorder and download data, dispatch and radio recordings, track inspection and maintenance records, crew assignment and hours-of-service records, and the railroad’s own incident investigation file.
- We look for a safety statute violation first, because under Section 53 that finding can remove contributory negligence from the case entirely.
- We take over contact with the railroad’s claim agent. You should not be giving a recorded account of a serious injury while you are still in treatment.
- We identify the crew and the witnesses before they transfer or retire.
- We evaluate forum, with 28 U.S.C. § 1445(a) in mind.
- We build the case to be tried, not to be settled on the railroad’s timetable.
We do not assume a case will resolve on fair terms just because the injury is severe.
Key takeaways
- FELA replaces workers’ compensation for railroad employees. The claim is a federal negligence action under 45 U.S.C. §§ 51-60, not a benefits process.
- The causation standard is relaxed. Section 51 imposes liability for injury resulting in whole or in part from the carrier’s negligence.
- Assumption of risk is gone. Section 54 removes the argument that you accepted the dangers of railroading.
- A safety statute violation can eliminate contributory negligence. Under Section 53, damages are normally reduced in proportion to the employee’s negligence — but not where the carrier’s violation of an employee safety statute contributed to the injury.
- Three years, not two. Section 56 requires the action to be commenced within three years of accrual, and cumulative injury cases raise harder accrual questions.
- The railroad cannot remove the case. Under 28 U.S.C. § 1445(a), a FELA action filed in state court stays there.
- Damages are full tort damages, and Section 51’s death beneficiaries are structured differently from Texas wrongful death beneficiaries.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do I file for workers’ compensation or a FELA claim?
If you are a railroad employee injured on the job, your claim against the railroad is governed by FELA, the federal statute at 45 U.S.C. §§ 51-60. It is a negligence action rather than a benefits process, which means fault matters and the case is built on evidence. Because the two systems work so differently, and because the railroad begins its own investigation immediately, this is worth confirming with a lawyer early rather than assuming.
Do I have to prove the railroad was at fault?
Yes. That is the central difference from workers’ compensation. But the standard is favorable: Section 51 imposes liability where the injury resulted in whole or in part from the carrier’s negligence, so the railroad’s negligence does not have to be the only cause or the main cause. Section 54 also removes the assumption of risk defense entirely.
What if the accident was partly my fault?
Partial fault does not end a FELA claim. Section 53 provides that damages are diminished by the jury in proportion to the employee’s negligence rather than barred. And if the carrier violated a statute enacted for the safety of employees and that violation contributed to the injury, Section 53 provides that the employee is not held guilty of contributory negligence at all. Whether that applies depends on the facts, which is exactly why the safety-violation analysis comes first.
How long do I have to bring a FELA claim?
Section 56 requires the action to be commenced within three years from the day the cause of action accrued. Determining when a claim accrued is straightforward for a single traumatic event and considerably harder for cumulative conditions such as hearing loss or repetitive trauma. Because a missed deadline permanently ends a claim, confirm your date with a licensed attorney rather than calculating it yourself.
The claim agent asked me to sign something. Should I?
Not before a lawyer reviews it. Section 55 voids any contract, rule, regulation, or device intended to enable the carrier to exempt itself from FELA liability, but the same section permits the carrier to set off benefits it has already paid. How a payment or document is characterized has consequences, and the safe order of operations is review first, sign second.
Can the railroad move my case to federal court?
No, if it was filed in state court. Under 28 U.S.C. § 1445(a), a FELA action against a railroad brought in state court may not be removed to a federal district court. This is unusual — most defendants have a removal right — and it is one reason where a case is filed deserves thought at the outset.
My family member died in a rail accident. Who can bring the claim?
Section 51 addresses death and sets a tiered structure: the surviving widow or husband and children; if none, the employee’s parents; if none, the next of kin dependent upon the employee. That is not the same list Texas applies to an ordinary wrongful death claim, so families should not rely on general Texas wrongful death guidance for a rail death. This needs specific legal review.
Does FELA cover injuries that built up over years?
Cumulative trauma, hearing loss, and exposure-related conditions are recognized as injuries under FELA, but they raise accrual questions that determine whether the three-year period under Section 56 has run. These cases turn on medical evidence and on when the claim is deemed to have accrued. They should be evaluated promptly rather than assumed to be too old.
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice, and reading it does not create an attorney-client relationship. FELA is a federal statute, and deadlines and outcomes depend on the specific facts of each case. McCray Law Firm, PLLC is licensed to practice in Texas and is admitted in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas. If you believe you may have a claim, speak with a licensed attorney about your situation before any deadline passes.
About the author. Marcell Owens is the owner of McCray Law Firm, PLLC in Houston, Texas. He earned his J.D. cum laude from Texas Southern University’s Thurgood Marshall School of Law and has been licensed to practice in Texas since 2015. He is admitted in Texas and in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas, and was included in the Top 40 Under 40 National Black Trial Lawyers. He works with a team of attorneys handling personal injury and wrongful death matters across Texas.
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