I can't say for sure what the congressman actually meant, but what he said is sort of accurate in one sense: as far as I know, truck drivers and pilots have a legal maximum number of hours they can work in a week or month (not just on a single shift), whereas a railroad can work a train crew 11 hours, 59 minutes followed by 8 hours of rest (with a 1.5 hour call, so really only 6.5 hours of sleep, less once you consider the time it takes to get home from the reporting point and actually fall asleep), followed by another 11:59 of work and another 8 hours of rest and another 11:59 of work, ad infinitum.

This is a great way to make lots of money, but there's only so much of it you can take before you go insane (one of my coworkers quit because he deemed that his sanity was worth more than the $120,000 per year he was making).

Not to mention how unsafe a train operated by a sleep-deprived engineer and conductor is (a 10-second brain nap is all that's needed to miss a signal)...