(The Washington Post published the following story by Don Phillips on its website on October 8.)
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Both deaths and many of the serious injuries in a California collision between a freight train and a commuter train last year were apparently caused when seated passengers rammed into work tables that are common on many U.S. commuter railroad cars, the National Transportation Safety Board said yesterday.
The Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) said it is looking at whether action needs to be taken to lessen the risk of injury from the tables, which are usually mounted between facing seats, allowing commuters to use laptop computers, eat or read.
Virginia Railway Express has only two types of cars with work tables — the single-level Mafersa cars and the double-deck cars on loan from the Seattle Sounder commuter system. The new Amtrak Acela Express electric trains have similar tables, as do Amtrak cafe cars and dining cars. MARC commuter rail cars have none.
The NTSB, which investigates major accidents but has no regulatory power, identified several safety issues in its report on the April 23, 2002, head-on collision between a Burlington Northern Santa Fe freight train and a Metrolink commuter train in the suburban Los Angeles town of Placentia.
In its final report, the board said the probable cause of the wreck was “inattentiveness to the signal system” on the part of the freight train engineer and conductor, who were busy talking about a non-work matter.
The train ran through a yellow caution signal that should have led the crew to slow. Instead, the train approached the next signal, which was red, at too high a speed to stop. It then rammed into the Riverside-San Juan Capistrano commuter train, which was on the same track preparing to go through a switch at the junction and go south.
The board said that a contributing cause was “the absence of a positive train control system” that would have automatically stopped the freight short of the red signal. The railroad industry has traditionally shunned full installation of such systems because of their high cost and uncertainty about the reliability of some of the technology. The board has been pushing the industry and the railroad administration since 1990 to perfect and install positive train control systems.
“At some time, you have to stop talking and start doing,” said NTSB Chairman Ellen G. Engleman, noting that the board will step up the pressure to move forward with the system.
Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor between Washington and Boston has a form of positive train control, and several experiments are underway in Illinois, Alaska and other locations.
The safety board noted that the Metrolink commuter cars remained relatively intact in the crash, but that the two deaths and the most serious of the 141 injuries appeared to have been caused by abdominal traumas and internal bleeding caused by the tables.
According to longtime railroaders, such injuries sometimes caused the death of conductors and flagmen in the days when freight trains had cabooses. Slack between car couplers would sometimes allow the cars to run together violently and slam crew members hard against the tables in the caboose.
The railroad administration and the Volpe Transportation Center of Boston are now conducting passenger car impact tests at a test center near Pueblo, Colo., partly to determine how to mitigate the damage from the tables.
“The issue of tables has been identified for quite some time,” said Grady Cothen, the FRA’s deputy associate administrator for safety standards. “But the events at Placentia were quite surprising” because of the severity of the abdominal injuries.
Cothen said the agency is looking at a number of solutions, such as wider table edges and flexible mounts that would give way in a wreck. In general, he said, it is safer to have tables between facing seats so passengers do not slam into each other.