(The following story by Matthew L. Wald appeared on the New York Times website on January 21, 2010.)
WASHINGTON, D.C. — The federal government should require surveillance cameras in nearly all locomotives, to allow railroad managers to see if engineers are texting or talking on cellphones, sleeping or admitting unauthorized visitors, the National Transportation Safety Board recommended on Thursday.
The recommendation resulted from the investigation into the crash of a commuter train in Chatsworth, Calif., in 2008 that killed 25 people. The engineer, who was among those killed, was apparently composing a text message when he ran a red signal and the train collided with a freight train at a combined speed of more than 80 miles per hour.
Such surveillance would be far greater than that used on other forms of commercial transportation, the board chairwoman, Deborah A. P. Hersman, said at a meeting here Thursday to draft the recommendations. But board officials said the Chatsworth crash demonstrated that behavior like that of the commuter train engineer, which violated railroad rules, is apparently common. The freight train conductor was also using his cellphone at the time, the investigation showed.
Rules against cellphone use and other prohibited activity are virtually unenforceable, the officials said, because it is so hard to see into the cab of a train.
“Technology has the ability to increase the number of distractions, but it also has the ability to increase safety in the cab,” Ms. Hersman said. “It’s a new paradigm, this area of distractions; it’s changing how humans behave. It’s our hope that the recommendations today will change how humans perform.”
Such surveillance has already generated opposition.
Soon after the Chatsworth accident, the Los Angeles commuter rail line, Metrolink, installed two cameras that look into the cab in every locomotive, but the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen promptly filed a lawsuit seeking their removal on the ground that the cameras violated California privacy laws. The case is still in court, and the cameras are still in the cabs.
The board has long recommended that airline cockpits, which are already equipped with voice recorders, also have cameras, but for use only in accident investigations, not routine surveillance. In the minutes leading up to the Chatsworth crash, the engineer, Robert Sanchez, passed several signal lights and was supposed to notify a dispatcher by radio that he had seen each one, a staff expert told the safety board at the hearing.
According to a tape of the radio transmissions, Mr. Sanchez reported having passed several green and one yellow signal. But the recording did not capture him radioing that he had seen the last yellow signal or the final red signal, investigators said.
“This engineer really did not have his head in the game,” Ms. Hersman said.
Referring to the privacy issue raised by the engineers union, she said, “We have to put the collective ahead of the individual.”
The commuter and freight trains were visible to each other for only about five seconds before the crash, investigators said. The freight train engineer applied the emergency brakes in the last two seconds; Mr. Sanchez never did.
Mr. Sanchez had worked a split shift of 6 a.m. to 9:30 a.m., and 2 p.m. to 7 p.m., with a 70-mile commute at the beginning and end of each day. But a board expert, Rick Narvell, said at the hearing that fatigue did not contribute to the crash.
“Yes, I’m concerned about it,” he told the board members, “but the circumstances of this accident indicate we had a fellow here who was alert and texting.”
Mr. Sanchez sent or received a total of 43 text messages on the day of the crash, including one 22 seconds before the crash, the board had said. He had been reprimanded five times in the previous two-and-a-half years, investigators said, including twice for using a cellphone while on duty. On one occasion, a supervisor discovered this by dialing the engineer’s cellphone, and hearing it ring in the cab.
Less than a month after the crash, Congress passed a law that by 2015 requires large railroads to install “positive train control” — a computer system that senses a train approaching a red signal at high speed and slows it down or stops it if an engineer disobeys the signal. But the board has been calling for this kind of system for years, Ms. Hersman noted at the hearing,
And investigators voiced skepticism that the railroads would complete that job by 2015. The industry has a record of asking for extensions, and the federal government of granting them.