U.S. Surface Transportation Board Proposes Long-Overdue Streamlining of Environmental Review in Rail Proceedings

On March 25, 2026, the U.S. Surface Transportation Board (Board or STB) issued a notice of proposed rulemaking (NPRM) that would substantially revise the Board’s National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) implementing regulations in 49 CFR parts 1011 and 1105. The proposal is a the latest effort by the Executive to align the agency rules with major statutory and judicial developments, codify current agency practices, and generally streamline environmental review in agency proceedings.

The NPRM provides significant insight into the Board’s understanding of how NEPA affects proceedings before the agency. The revised regulations would provide parties appearing before the Board more detailed guidance as to when NEPA does not apply to a Board action. The NPRM accomplishes this in two significant ways.

First, the NPRM more clearly defines the types of Board actions that do not trigger NEPA requirements, including circumstances where federal law exempts NEPA review or where Board action is a mere ministerial act. The revised regulations also include an expanded list of actions that the Board does not consider “major Federal actions” requiring environmental review.

Second, the proposed regulations would expand and regularize the use of categorical exclusions while preserving Office of Environmental Analysis (OEA) ability to conclude that a categorical exclusion would be inappropriate in a given proceeding due to extraordinary circumstances. The NPRM proposes new and revised exclusions for actions that normally do not significantly affect the human environment, including certain abandonments and discontinuances where there would be no threshold-exceeding traffic diversions and, for abandonments, no preconsummation salvage. The Board also proposes to adopt categorical exclusions for proceedings under 49 USC § 24308 involving Amtrak access, reciprocal switching agreements, certain connecting track, offers of financial assistance, and a range of routine corporate or operational matters.

The NPRM would also modernize and streamline NEPA review by pairing a more disciplined approach to review thresholds with a faster, more efficient environmental review process. The proposed regulations formalize the process by which the OEA determines the appropriate level of NEPA review and allows the OEA flexibility to reclassify a proceeding for NEPA purposes where project-specific circumstances warrant a higher or lower level of environmental review. The NPRM would also substantially streamline the process for completing environmental assessments (EAs) and environmental impact statements (EISs). For EAs and EISs outside the abandonment and discontinuance context, the Board would reduce the prefiling notice period from six months to 45 days and implement congressionally mandated page limits and deadlines added to NEPA. The Board also intends generally to move away from its historic draft/final document approach in favor of a single published EA or EIS while preserving discretion to issue preliminary or draft materials where useful. And party-prepared environmental reports would largely be confined to abandonments and discontinuances that are not categorically excluded.

The NPRM reflects a changed NEPA landscape. Since the Board last comprehensively revised its environmental rules in 1991, Congress has amended NEPA, and the Council on Environmental Quality rescinded its governmentwide NEPA regulations. The most fundamental change was the recent decision in Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County, Colorado, 605 U.S. 168 (2025), where the Supreme Court clarified that NEPA requires an agency to review environmental effects only of the proposed action, not of future or geographically separate projects, and affords agencies substantial discretion in drawing a manageable line in defining the scope of environmental review.

The Board is proposing a much leaner environmental review process calibrated to this new landscape and the public push for faster permitting decisions. The expanded list of categorical exclusions coupled with OEA discretion in each case to modify the level of review needed may help the Board avoid both over-review and under-review in any given proceeding. While these proposed reforms would move many low-impact proceedings out of protracted environmental review and into a more predictable track, rail stakeholders should not anticipate a less thorough review of proposed action by OEA and the Board.

Freight rail carriers should consider submitting comments on the proposed revisions to the Board’s NEPA regulations. The comment period is an opportunity for railroads to voice support for aspects of the NPRM that bring discipline, speed, and legal coherence to environmental review in rail proceedings and to suggest constructive edits that would further improve the environmental review process. Member Karen Hedlund also invited public comment specifically on the potential environmental or historic effects of excluding postconsummation salvage activities from environmental review through a categorical exclusion. Comments on the NPRM are due April 24, 2026.