The signal system already in place should have prevented this. Except that it was down for maintenance.

https://nypost.com/2018/02/04/feds-investigating-why-amtrak-switch-was-set-in-wrong-position/

Investigators found the switch still padlocked Sunday morning, Sumwalt said.

The rail line in that area is maintained and operated by CSX and Amtrak uses it through a “hosting” agreement with the freight railroad.

Amtrak’s CEO Richard Anderson earlier Sunday said the signal system was down and CSX dispatchers were manually routing trains.

”The only way the Amtrak train could have gotten onto the siding was for a switch to have been thrown,” Anderson said.

 

This shit is also a result of the constant managerial push for reduced manpower. The RRs have been trying to get 1-man freight trains forever. I feel that 2-man has proven unsafe and costly enough. With an engineer, conductor, and switchman there was better monitoring and operation of the train, crossings, switching, signals, and conditions.

This is the mentality that will say "we can go driverless because our AI is 99.99% accurate",,, resulting in the thousands and thousands of fatalities and injuries which come with a 0.009% failure rate of such systems. So much of life occurs under "plan B"!

 

From my experience in rail transit, the signal system should have prevented a train from passing over a misaligned switch and routed into an occupied side track.

Railway signaling is technically called "Interlocking Control" and today's signal systems are either vital relay or checked redundant microprocessor controlled. On many rail transit systems, trains can be run fully automatic without any human intervention and the operator is in the cab just to take over in case the control system defaults to fail safe mode.

Every time I hear of a train collision, it's like hearing that someone has been attacked by a tyrannosaurus rex. With practically every aspect of our daily lives being controlled by technology, why are some of these railroads still operating in the Jurassic Period?

 

https://www.king5.com/article/news/...ment/281-768ece50-1619-4ac8-9be5-7035f4658ed9

The National Transportation Safety Board has published its final report Monday on a deadly Amtrak derailment in Washington state in 2017, with the agency's vice chairman blasting what he described as a "Titanic-like complacency" among those charged with ensuring train operations were safe.

The train was on its first paid passenger run on a new route from Tacoma to Portland, Oregon, when it plunged onto Interstate 5, killing three people and injuring dozens.

In findings released last month, the NTSB said the engineer lost track of where he was and failed to slow down before a curve. The agency said a series of decisions or inactions by Amtrak as well as state and federal regulators set the engineer up to fail. The agency's vice chairman, Bruce Landsberg, wrote in comments published with the final report Monday that the root cause was "extremely lax safety oversight, unclear responsibility, and poor training."

Final Report:
https://www.scribd.com/document/414400461/NTSB-final-report-on-DuPont-Amtrak-derailment

 

Hi,

I hate hearing about this stuff. I used to take trains on a semi regular basis.