Lack of (Train) Control

It is with sadness that I write this blog, due to the 25 dead and the 135 injured as a result of the head-on collision of the Metrolink commuter train and the Union Pacific freight train near Los Angeles on Friday afternoon. My heart, sympathy and most of all, prayers, go out to all those who lost loved ones, and to the injured, wishing them a speedy recovery.

But, regardless of fault in this terrible collision, there is another feeling inside of me. OUTRAGE! What the hell happened here? Why was there no controls to prevent this? We won't know for awhile who or what was truly at fault here; early reports say it was the Metrolink engineer who failed to stop at a red signal. Regardless if that remains the outcome, more questions need to be answered.

I don't claim to be a rail expert, although I've travelled all over the country to work with rail districts, and I do know something about controls on trains. The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) and the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) has had a push on for years for PTC or Positive Train Control systems for railroads in the US. But it, like so many other things, is left to the whims of the railroads, so little gets done until a tragedy occurs. Just like after the last California commuter train - freight train head-on crash in 2002, there was a hue and cry to get something done again. I'd bet we'll hear the Feds moan about this, yet the railroads won't do much, if anything. It's almost like they're unregulated.

For example, there are a number of systems which work similarly. They are all a supervisory system that alerts the operator of a train if he fails to follow the required speeds or signals. First a light goes on along with a horn or other signal and then, if the operator still fails to do what is required, such as decrease speed or stop, the train goes into emergency braking, and all power to the locomotive is shut down. Engineers hate this since in most cases, the power has to be restored by a supervisor, and their a** gets written up at a minimum, or worse.

Want to read more about how the Federal Government has been protecting you on the rails? Here you go:

http://www.ntsb.gov/recs/mostwanted/positive_train.htm

So, I ask why the Metrolink train, on such a busy corridor, had nothing similar to PTC or ETMS or other control in place? From what I have heard, some commuter trains do, many do not. I believe the Coaster in San Diego, which shares the tracks with Union Pacific freights, the same as the Metrolink, has ETMS or a similar system. Why not Metrolink? Would the sounding of the alarms have prevented the tragedy of Friday afternoon, and turned what is now termed the second most deadly railroad crash in modern American history, into just an inconvenient delay, and a big ass chewing for someone? Probably. Too late to speculate now.

Ride the train. Save gas. Who wants to ride the train when one mistake, if that's what it was, can send you right into a freight train that takes a mile to stop on a good day? Granted, these accidents are few and far between, but there is no backup plan? No copilot, which would be the automatic train control? Sure, make the light rail vehicles have all these controls, a dead-man control so if the driver of that vehicle becomes incapacitated the light rail vehicle will stop. Even SCADA (Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition) systems on some, monitored from a central location, to assure smooth traffic flow and that there are always multiple safety systems in place.
But apparently, our nations commuter rails don't place the same emphasis on safety.

I have only one more observation to make. Those commuter trains are push-pull meaning the locomotive could have been behind the cars instead of in front when then collision occurred. Had that been the configuration on Friday, September 12, the toll would have made it the deadliest train collision in our history, as the head car would have hit the Union Pacific locomotive head-on and the Metrolink locomotive would have continued to crush the cars between it and the UP locomotive. I'd estimate maybe 100 deaths or more in that scenario; just a guess but maybe for those who think things could not have been worse, a guardian angel was in Chatsworth that afternoon after all...