This has every appearance of an effort to make us "feel good" about the safety of RR bridges by largely auditing reporting, without much of an aggressive on site engineering inspection, except maybe when they uncover something really scary.....

It is true that where RR's have a significant investment and risk that there is incentive to act correctly, but where investment not worth it, then you see if you can avoid maintenance. Then, of course, these institutions are "human" and things like ignorance, greed, pride, negligence, of just plain foolishness never ever are a cause for concern.....so some regulation and oversight can act as a check on stupid.

Unfortunately, many of these programs are "feel good" these days, allowing regulators and politicians to act like they are "doing something", in a very minimal manner, often with highly limiting constraints, and little in the way of adequate resources to do it very well.

If the PUC does find something serious, it was my experience that they tried to address it, just not always very rapidly, or completely, given resource constraints, and a certain asymmetry of power in dealing with the RR's.