(The following story by Scott Van Horne appeared on the San Bernardino Sun website on January 27. Tim Smith is Chairman of the BLET’s California State Legislative Board.)
UPLAND, Calif. — A Metrolink train collision that killed 11 and injured 180 early Wednesday weighed on the minds of passengers heading home in the afternoon, but most said the tragedy would not deter them from riding the rails.
“I’ve been riding the Metrolink for quite some time, and they have a very good safety record,” Dave Grall, 38, of Hesperia said. “This was not a situation that was caused by a faulty train. This was caused by someone putting an obstacle on the tracks.”
A Los Angeles-bound Metrolink train slammed into an SUV parked on the tracks in Glendale about 6 a.m. Police suspect it was an aborted suicide attempt and arrested 25-year-old transient Juan Manuel Alvarez.
The collision derailed the double-decker commuter train and caused it to hit a parked freight locomotive and an oncoming Metrolink train.
“It’s very sad,” Roy Dorado, 63, said, as he finished the last leg of his commute from Claremont to San Bernardino. “That’s 10 lives that he affected.”
Still, Dorado said the trains are safe and he’d rather sit back and work on a crossword puzzle than deal with freeway traffic.
“You just don’t have all the stress,” he said.
Geri Gilham, 53, of Rialto sat doing needle point as the Metrolink lumbered out of the Upland station. She said the fatal crash would not stop her from using the trains to get to her job in El Monte.
“It concerns me that people are willing to park on the tracks to kill themselves,” she said. “But that’s out of the hands of Metrolink.”
Statistically, motorists are 40 times more likely to be involved in a collision than people on commuter trains or other forms of public transportation, including buses and subways, said Greg Hull, the American Public Transportation Association’s director of operations, safety and security programs for the American Public Transportation Association, a nonprofit group created by the public transit industry.
The industry has kept a high safety record despite increases in ridership and additional miles covered, he said.
In the past four years, there have been two accidents on the Metrolink in San Bernardino County, according to the Federal Railroad Administration. Neither was fatal.
Three Metrolink passengers died and about 200 were injured on April 23, 2002, in a head-on collision with a Burlington Northern and Santa Fe Railway train in Placentia.
The collision Wednesday was unavoidable because of the human factor, but the severity may have been reduced, said Tim Smith, chairman of California’s Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen.
Commuter trains use a system where trains are either pushed or pulled by an engine. The Metrolink train that derailed was being pushed while someone in the front-facing “cab car’ watched.
The lighter cars being shoved down the tracks buckled and slammed into the other trains, Smith said. If the engine had been in front, it probably would have pushed the SUV to the side, he said.
The engineers union has lobbied to end or limit the use of cab cars, but so far, their pleas have gone unanswered.
Commuter train agencies use this system because it’s less expensive and time consuming, and most don’t have facilities to switch engines around at the end of each line.
Federal Railroad Administration spokesman Warren Flatau said there is no hard evidence to support Smith’s assertion.
“In the commuter rail environment, this is the standard, and generally it has gone safely,” he said.
Even so, the FRA and other agencies will consider how the cab car system affected Wednesday’s crash.
“We know invariably there are going to be a lot of questions,” he said.
AREA TRAIN WRECKS
Sept. 7, 2003 A Union Pacific train derails in Beaumont and crashes into an oncoming train. Five crew members suffer minor injuries. May 21, 2003 A San Bernardino woman is killed when her car is trapped by rush-hour traffic on Metrolink tracks in Rialto. Witnesses tell police that a mechanical crossing arm descended behind her car.
April 23, 2002 A Burlington Northern and Santa Fe Railway train collides head-on with a Metrolink train in Placentia, killing three people and injuring more than 200.
Feb. 1, 1996 A freight train has a blockage in a brake line, sending it careening down the Cajon Pass. The resulting train crash kills two crew members and critically injures a third. The pass is closed for 2 days while tank cars loaded with hazardous chemicals burn. Dec. 30, 1993 A pedestrian is killed when he walks on tracks near Ontario International Airport.
May 12, 1989 A Southern Pacific train loses its brakes and crashes into homes on Duffy Street in Muscoy. Four people die, and a dozen homes are destroyed. Two weeks later, a gasoline pipeline damaged by a backhoe during the cleanup explodes. Two more people die in the fire, which destroys even more homes.