(The following story by Tom Mooney appeared on the Providence Journal website on March 15.)
PROVIDENCE, R.I. — A team from the National Transportation Safety Board arrived yesterday to investigate how an Amtrak Acela train leaving the city struck three railroad workers on a sharp curve of track near the Charles Street overpass Thursday, killing one of them.
Ruben Payan, the chief on-scene investigator, said NTSB officials were lining up interviews with witnesses and planning to examine the train’s track recorder, similar to an airliner’s black box. Investigators will also review the radio communications between an Amtrak dispatcher, the train and the men on the tracks.
The dispatcher had been in contact with the men while they were conducting routine track inspections earlier in the day, said Payan, and with the train as it pulled out of Providence Station with 162 passengers heading for Boston.
Investigators will also look at whether the location of the accident played any role, said Payan. “It is a sharp curve. Until we do site-mapping, we won’t know what the engineer could see and what the [men] on the ground could see.”
Amtrak yesterday identified the man who died as a contract employee with an architectural engineering firm. Gary Graves, of Delaware, worked for HNTB Holdings, of Kansas City, Mo. He was struck about 1:15 p.m. Amtrak officials have refused to identify the two Amtrak employees who were injured. One was injured seriously; the other was treated at a hospital and released, said Randal Brassell, a union official with the Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way Employees.
Payan said a fourth man in the work party was not hurt. He was sitting in a truck when the train came by.
The locomotive’s recording box could provide valuable information about the accident. It records the position of the train’s throttle, the train’s speed, brake applications and horn applications.
Thursday afternoon Amtrak said in a statement that the high-speed express train was traveling below the 55-mph limit posted for that stretch of track.
Among those to be interviewed, Payan said, will be the train’s engineer and anyone else in the locomotive at the time. Payan said he didn’t know whether the engineer had been tested for drug or alcohol use in the wake of the accident. The three NTSB investigators plan to be in Providence for about a week and will also review the train’s mechanics and signals along the track to make sure they were working properly.
It could take a year for the NTSB to issue a final report on the incident, though preliminary findings are expected sooner.
Payan said other officials with the Federal Railroad Administration are also investigating the incident.
In a separate case, a 69-year-old Stonington, Conn., woman was struck yesterday by a Washington-bound Acela train while walking her dog on the tracks in Stonington, police said.
Rosemary Riley was taken to a hospital with a serious arm injury. The police said she heard the train behind her but thought it was on a different track.
And in yet another case, NTSB officials plan to hold a meeting in Washington Tuesday to consider its final report on the collision in January 2007 of a Massachusetts commuter train and a track maintenance truck that killed two workers.
The train engineer in that case had a clear signal indication as he rounded a curve at 62 mph on a section of tracks near Woburn, Mass. When he saw the track maintenance vehicle, the engineer initiated emergency braking. The train speed decreased to 44 mph when the collision occurred. Two of the six maintenance employees were killed and two seriously injured.