(The following story by Jerry Mitchell appeared on the Clarion-Ledger website on July 12.)
JACKSON, Miss. — Half the nation’s head-on train collisions this year have taken place in Mississippi — all in the past two weeks.
“It’s a rare event, but there may be more coming,” former railroad administrator Gil Carmichael said Monday.
That’s because the once-dying rail business is booming. Last year, railroads shipped 11 million units — nearly three times as many units as in 1970.
In the 1970s, railroads were in desperate financial shape, said Tom White, a spokesman for the Association of American Railroads. “More than 20 percent of the railroads were in bankruptcy.”
Deregulation followed in the 1980s, and “railroads thought all they’d be carrying was rock and stone,” Carmichael said. “They began to downsize. They went from double-tracks down to single. The Illinois Central that used to run from New Orleans to Chicago was double-track the whole way.”
Removing the second set of tracks “set the stage for these kind of accidents,” he said.
Where Sunday’s accident took place, there are “between 20 and 30 trains that pass over this particular stretch of track each day,” Carmichael said.
On Sunday, two freight-train locomotives collided head-on in the Anding community in Yazoo County. Three have been confirmed dead, and a fourth is feared dead.
On June 28, five crew members were injured, two critically, in a fiery head-on collision on a west Jackson railroad track involving two freight trains.
The National Transportation Safety Board is investigating both accidents. Carmichael believes each resulted from human error. “The dispatching of trains is still done by human beings,” he said. “There were dispatching errors, which led to them facing each other at the same time.”
Human error is the No. 1 reason for rail accidents, according to the Federal Railroad Administration.
NTSB officials say for the past decade they’ve suggested a solution to such accidents — a “fail-safe” system called Positive Train Control, which automatically slows the train in case of a pending accident. Amtrak already uses the system between Boston and Washington, D.C.
But White said that there’s no such thing as a fail-safe system.
He said of the two Mississippi accidents: “We don’t know if it’s human error, but the system that’s in place works very well, and it’s very unusual when accidents happen.”
Although rail traffic has increased in recent years, railroads “have held the line on the number of train accidents,” said Warren Flatau, a spokesman for the Federal Railroad Administration. “In the first four months, there’s been a 5 percent decrease.”
Head-on collisions fell last year to 11 from 13 in 2003. There have been four so far this year, including the two Mississippi accidents.
Rail is an integral part of a growing business called intermodal transportation, which also utilizes ships and trucks.
Many of the world’s goods are now being made in the Pacific Rim region, and they’re being shipped to the U.S. in containers up to 53 feet long. These containers contain everything from Wal-Mart items to “Dollar General khaki pants,” Carmichael said. “I got a pair of ’em on.”
Once the ships arrive in the United States, containers are sent first by rail and then by truck to their final destinations. This increase “snuck up on the railroads,” Carmichael said.
One railroad, Burlington Northern, is now “double-tracking all the way to the West Coast,” he said. Another, Union Pacific, “is literally having to turn down container business,” he said.
Carmichael hopes Congress will move to upgrade the rail system, which will help reduce freeway congestion: “Right now they’re having to rebuild highways every seven or eight years.”