(The following story by Steve Ritea appeared on the Newsday website on April 2.)
NEW YORK — The Long Island Rail Road has halted installation of a new switching system at busy Jamaica station, saying misfiring of an electric charge was the root cause of the derailment that led to railroad-wide delays and a snarled evening commute.
LIRR President Helena Williams said the railroad will pay up to $20,000 to the management and engineering firm Parsons Transportation Group, based in Washington, D.C., to assure the problem does not recur.
A battery of tests run since Thursday morning’s derailment showed that the eastbound train car that derailed passed over a switch as the switch was moving, Williams said. That caused the car to go off the tracks and strike another train car. No passengers were injured, but two eastbound tracks at the high-volume station were out of commission for the entire day.
Williams said workers on the tracks who were testing the new switch-controlling system unintentionally sent out the electric charge. The charge indicated to a LIRR employee in one of the towers near the Jamaica station that it was safe to pull a lever that moved the switch.
“None of that work will resume until we have developed a new quality assurance plan to make sure no stray electricity can energize anything it’s not supposed to energize,” Williams said Tuesday.
Switches on the LIRR currently are controlled by workers in some 20 towers systemwide who operate long machines with scores of levers. Workers pull certain levers to control switches on designated stretches of track. The technology dates back to 1913.
Circuits along the tracks provide electricity that allow the levers on the machines to be pulled. As a fail-safe measure, the circuits are supposed to cut off electricity to certain levers whenever a train passes over them, so the levers cannot be turned, Williams said.
Williams said workers have been updating the system as part of a $42.3-million effort to place microprocessors along the tracks, first around Jamaica, so that computers can someday control switches.
On Thursday, workers were testing a microprocessor near a tower and “an anomaly occurred in the circuitry that created a sneak path for electricity” into the lever system, Williams said.
A worker in a tower west of Jamaica “made a report right after the derailment that he was able to move the levers” and that the machine “indicated to them that the train had passed and they could now set the switches for the next train,” Williams said. The machine in question was made in 1938.
In fact, the second-to-last car of a 9:35 a.m. Hempstead train still was crossing over that switch when the worker pulled the levers and moved the switch. The train went off the tracks just west of the station, striking the last car of a 9:34 a.m. Huntington train. The derailed car was not removed from the tracks until 10 p.m. that night.
The two damaged cars will be repaired and put back into service, Williams said.