(The following story by Noah Bierman appeared on the Boston Globe website on June 3.)
BOSTON — Investigators who re-created the route taken by the Green Line train that crashed in Newton last week determined that the driver’s view would not have been blocked by trees, glare, or any other obstruction on the stretch of track leading up to the accident site.
“There were no issues there,” Peter Knudson, spokesman for the National Transportation Safety Board, which is leading the investigation, said yesterday. “We didn’t find anything that would have obstructed the view.”
Investigators have ruled out almost all causes that would have been outside trolley operator Ter’rese Edmonds’s control, including track problems, signal problems, or brake problems. Knudson said it is expected to take weeks before the agency obtains cellphone records to determine if Edmonds was texting or talking while driving.
Investigators have said that Edmonds was traveling 37 to 38 miles per hour when her train rear-ended another that was moving at 3 or 4 miles per hour. The speed limit on that part of the Green Line’s D-Branch is 40 miles per hour, but Edmonds was supposed to have been traveling no faster than 10 miles per hour because she had passed a red signal just after Waban Station.
Edmonds, a 24-year-old who began operating a trolley in October, died in the crash Wednesday, and several passengers were seriously injured.
The NTSB is not expected to assign a cause of the crash formally for another 12 to 18 months.
Knudson said the investigation at the site is wrapping up, and he said he does not expect service disruptions on the line to continue. Three of 11 investigators remain in the area, and they are expected to leave in the next few days.