(The following story by Bruce Siceloff appeared on the Raleigh News website on October 20.)
RALEIGHT, N.C. — “I don’t believe they see us,” the Norfolk Southern Railway engineer says, and he sounds his horn at an automobile approaching the rail crossing more than 100 yards ahead.
The car freezes with its front end across the tracks. A few seconds later, the locomotive smacks it with a loud BAM!
Rail safety experts will study recent video recordings of 400 train accidents like this one to learn more about why 329 Americans were killed at rail crossings last year, and 266 more died while walking or sitting on the tracks.
They’re looking for new ways to design rail crossings and other safety measures, anything to keep more cars and pedestrians from getting in the way of trains that are far too big and heavy to stop in time.
“We’ll see why motorists do the things they do,” Betty Monro, acting administrator of the Federal Railroad Administration, said Tuesday. “We’ll see where we need to focus our efforts.”
Monro came to Raleigh to announce a $482,000 federal grant that will finance the research by the state Department of Transportation and Norfolk Southern.
Norfolk Southern has outfitted 1,100 of its 3,000 locomotives with small digital cameras that capture the engineer’s view of the tracks ahead and record information about the train’s horn, brakes and speed. When an accident happens, the recorders can provide a wealth of details to help explain why somebody stepped or drove onto the tracks at the wrong time.
A freight train with three locomotives pulling 100 freight cars can weigh 10,000 tons, said John M. Samuels, Norfolk Southern senior vice president. If the engineer hits the brakes at 55 mph, the train may travel another mile and a half before coming to a stop.
“We want to find out what we can do to design the crossings so that the public will understand the danger and understand that the train cannot stop,” Samuels said.
The railroad also wants to have evidence to support its case if a crash turns into a lawsuit. How fast was the train traveling? When did the horn sound?
In the video of the car that stopped halfway on the tracks, the unidentified driver appears to be wearing a checkered shirt. The automobile passengers told investigators that a woman in a solid shirt was driving, Samuels said, but she had switched seats with the real driver, her inebriated husband.
A lawsuit against the railroad evaporated after Norfolk Southern showed the plaintiffs what the video camera had recorded. The crash occurred in November 2000, Samuels said.
Another crash video shows kids who see the approaching train as their mom pulls, unaware, onto the tracks. A trucker watches for cars in an intersection on the other side of the tracks, but he forgets to watch for a train on the tracks. The three videos all involved crashes in other states, and there were no serious injuries, Norfolk Southern said.
In North Carolina, stationary cameras mounted at a Charlotte rail crossing several years ago captured images of school bus drivers, police officers and other motorists weaving around crossing gates and narrowly averting disaster.
The state has closed dozens of hazardous rail crossings since the mid-1990s. Other crossings have been improved with warning devices and extra gates, medians and other measures that make it harder for drivers to cross the tracks when they should wait.
“We have virtually eliminated that kind of fatality in the 174 rail miles between Raleigh and Charlotte,” David D. King, deputy state transportation secretary, said Monday.