Steven Harrod is an assistant professor at the University of Dayton in Ohio, with expertise in transportation and railroad safety.
Sunday morning’s derailment of a Metro-North train in the Bronx is a frustrating and deadly reminder that after nearly 200 years of technological development, railway safety is still dependent on the train crew being alert and aware of their surroundings.
The investigation will be strikingly similar to that of the July 24 derailment and crash in Santiago de Compostel, Spain, where a high-speed passenger train failed to slow at a known point where track design required a slower speed. Seventy-nine people were killed. It has since been determined that the train engineer was distracted by a mobile phone conversation and not aware of his surroundings.
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The train that crashed Sunday morning was No. 8808, an express that had no scheduled stops between Tarrytown and Harlem. From an engineer’s point of view, the line between Tarrytown and the crash site, Spuyten Duyvil, is a relatively straight, unremarkable track, and that is likely the problem. At Spuyten Duyvil, a severe curve requires slow speed. Did the engineer, on a quiet Sunday morning with few other trains operating, lose awareness of his surroundings?
The investigation must focus on the engineer, who reportedly claimed the train brakes were not functioning. Could they have failed? Possibly, but the transportation safety investigators have many tools to assess the condition of the brakes. Passenger trains carry an event recorder, a black box, just like airliners.
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If the lack of engineer awareness is the cause of this accident, it could have been prevented with Positive Train Control, or PTC, a federally mandated rail safety system that is supposed to be in service by 2015, but has been resisted by many railroads. PTC would provide some automated supervision of allowable track speeds.
The human element, however, will always be a challenging factor in transportation safety, as operating crews respond to new automated systems with learned and subconscious behaviors that in themselves raise new safety concerns.
Yahoo Local News – New York Daily News
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