(The following story by Jackson Bell of the Glendale News-Press and Leader appeared on the Los Angeles Times website on January 28. Tim Smith is Chairman of the BLET’s California State Legislative Board.)
SOUTHEAST GLENDALE, Calif. — Costly precautions that could have lessened the suffering in Wednesday’s violent train wreck weren’t used, officials said.
Police say Juan Manuel Alvarez, 25, of Compton, drove his Jeep Cherokee onto the train track near Chevy Chase Drive at about 6 a.m. Wednesday in an attempted suicide but jumped out of the SUV just before the collision. The Metrolink 100 train headed south from Moorpark to Union Station hit the car and careened into a parked locomotive and another passenger train, killing 11 people and injuring more than 180. The three trains lay smashed on a track between Chevy Chase Drive and Los Feliz Boulevard.
Those 11 lives might have been saved and the damage reduced if the train that slammed into Alvarez’s Jeep had been pulled by its locomotive instead of pushed from behind, said Timothy Smith, the state legislative chairman for the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen.
The cab car that led the train caught on the Jeep, and the middle cars were smashed in an accordion effect by the locomotive that was still chugging in the rear, Smith said. The cab car has seating for passengers and a control booth for the engineer.
If it had been the locomotive that struck the Jeep head-on, the outcome might have been less perilous, he said.
“The heavier locomotive, more times than not, shoves the obstacle, whereas a cab car will more than likely derail,” said Smith, a 32-year locomotive engineer who has been in several train collisions.
The union has been lobbying for 10 years to do away with the “push-pull” system, which has the locomotive push cars one way and pull them the other, and instead just pull the cars, Smith said.
After the disaster Wednesday, Mayor Bob Yousefian called on state and federal lawmakers to work toward eliminating all grade crossings. He said doing away with the crossings would keep cars off railroad tracks and speed up commuter and freight train travel.
In their place, Yousefian said a bridge could be built over railroad tracks or an underpass could be dug.
“In this county, we haven’t put a lot of money into this technology, and we are so far behind [Asian and European countries],” he said. “And then we ask people to take the train to work instead of their cars, and this tragedy happens. We are sending the wrong message to people.”
But the elimination of grade crossings is not a new notion nor an inexpensive task, Yousefian said. Southern California Assn. of Government studies have estimated that removing them in Southern California would cost more than $2 billion. To renovate just one would cost about $9 million, Smith said.
Rep. Adam Schiff called Wednesday morning’s tragedy an unfortunate wake-up call.
“What happened [Wednesday], among other things, demonstrates how vulnerable rail transit is,” Schiff said. “We put so much focus on airport security, and there are still enormous gaps. For someone to be able to park their car and cause such a tremendous loss like this shows how vulnerable we are.”
Schiff plans on requesting federal funding to improve the area’s high-traffic crossings but said fixing them all would be too costly.
Metrolink officials said they will wait for the National Transportation Safety Board to conclude their investigations before making any changes to operations. Board representatives said Thursday that it is too early to comment on recommendations because the investigation just started.
But even if all these safety improvements are implemented, Yousefian said it will still be difficult to stop those like Alvarez who are intent on causing train crashes.
“I don’t know if we can prevent a guy from doing something stupid like that,” he said.