(The following story by Janine DeFao appeared on the San Francisco Chronicle website on January 28.)
SAN FRANCISCO — Wednesday’s deadly train derailment in Glendale has renewed concerns of train engineers and safety experts that it is unsafe for locomotives to push rather than pull train cars along a track, leaving passengers in lighter- weight “cab cars” most exposed in the event of a crash.
That was the case Wednesday when a Metrolink train smashed into a Jeep Cherokee, with the train being led by a 57-ton cab car and powered from behind by a locomotive more than twice as heavy.
“If a locomotive had hit that Jeep Cherokee, it wouldn’t have derailed and hit another train, and you wouldn’t have 11 people dead,” said Bob Tucker, a railroad industry consultant in Amarillo, Texas.
Tim Smith, California state chairman of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen, said the union has been complaining about the practice for years.
“We feel our engineers (in cab cars) are very vulnerable to injury and death, and so are the passengers who sit right behind them. Cab cars tend to run into things and over things and derail, where locomotives tend to shove things off the track,” said Smith, who said the union’s warnings have gone unheeded.
That’s because regulators and passenger rail lines, including Amtrak and Caltrain in the Bay Area, believe the practice is safe.
“There’s no strong or clear evidence that indicates one method of operation is less safe than another,” said Steve Kulm, spokesman for the Federal Railroad Administration, which issued passenger rail safety standards in 1999. The cab cars in the Metrolink crash were manufactured in 1993, before the regulations took effect.
The Federal Railroad Administration does not keep statistics comparing injuries and deaths in collisions in trains led by cab-cars versus those led by locomotives.
But a 1996 administration study looking at the impact of a head-on crash between a locomotive and cab car found that above 35 mph, occupants in the cab car likely would suffer severe injury or fatality.
The study also noted the concern that “occupants of the relatively exposed cab car, including the engineer, are vulnerable to serious injury or fatality in the event of a collision with either a road vehicle at a grade crossing or with another train.”
Still, the configuration is commonplace for commuter rail lines, and has been in use since the 1950s because it allows trains to zip back and forth between destinations without using the time and space it takes to turn the locomotive around or the expense of running a locomotive at both the front and back of the train.
With the locomotive in back, the engineer controls the train from the cab car, a modified passenger car.
Caltrain spokeswoman Jayme Maltbie Kunz said the railroad has not had problems with the cab-forward, or “push-pull,” configuration.
“We have seen no reduction in safety to our passengers operating in a push-pull configuration,” said Maltbie Kunz.
She said cab cars struck a Coca Cola truck in 1999 and the vehicle of a suicidal man in October and neither collision caused a derailment or serious injury to passengers or engineers. In the case of the soda truck, bottles and cans flew through the windows of the cab car and pelted passengers.
George Elsmore, head of railroad operations and safety for the California Public Utilities Commission, agreed that the train’s configuration makes little difference.
“The relative safety between the two modes is practically identical on a crash-worthiness basis,” Elsmore said in a Wednesday interview. He said both cab cars and locomotives have similar federally mandated crash protection standards and devices mounted on the front to deflect objects.
But that’s not enough to assuage the fears of Berkeley resident Peter Hinckley, an Amtrak engineer for 30 years who conducts trains from Oakland to Bakersfield and Sacramento. He began operating in push-pull mode about two years ago.
“I’m surprised it hasn’t happened years ago,” he said of a crash like the one in Glendale.
“I have hit heavy equipment, locomotive first,” he said. In a cab car, he said, “we would have been all over the landscape.”
Hinckley said Amtrak is aware of the danger but will not make changes.
Amtrak spokeswoman Sarah Swain declined to respond, beyond saying the cab- forward configuration is “common practice on passenger railroads in general.”