Objects Hit Trains So Often There's Term for It: Getting Rocked
New York Times-1 hour ago
Nevertheless, the possibility that a flying object hit an Amtrak train before it lurched off the rails Tuesday in Philadelphia has unnerved riders ...
FBI Investigating Possibility that Derailed Train Was Hit by Projectile
Blog-Slate Magazine (blog)-May 15, 2015
Blog-Slate Magazine (blog)-May 15, 2015
Objects Hit Trains So Often There’s Term for It: Getting Rocked
PHILADELPHIA
— In the dark blocks of crumbling rowhouses pushed up against vacant
factories along Glenwood Avenue, a group of young men hanging out on a
stoop on a recent night said it was easy to sneak onto the nearby
railroad tracks.
“There’s
fences, but a lot of times they are falling down,” said a 16-year-old
with long hair and a thin mustache who gave only his first name, Isaac.
“A lot of people go down, creepy people, bums — they throw rocks, they
throw bottles, but usually it’s no big deal.”
Nevertheless, the possibility that a flying object hit an Amtrak train
before it lurched off the rails Tuesday in Philadelphia has unnerved
riders and drawn increased public scrutiny to the safety along that
stretch of track. Federal and railway officials say being struck by
rocks, bricks and even bullets is a longstanding problem for trains in
the country’s rail systems. While not speculating on the cause of Tuesday’s accident, a retired Amtrak
engineer and a former transportation safety official with the federal
government each said that a projectile striking a train would be a
dangerous distraction for an engineer.
Investigators
have not assigned a cause or blame for the crash of Amtrak’s Northeast
Regional Train 188 as it made its way to New York from Washington. Eight
passengers were killed and more than 200 people, including members of
the crew, were injured.
The
engineer, Brandon Bostian, told investigators that he had no
recollection of anything after passing the North Philadelphia station.
Around the same time, projectiles also hit two other trains in the area,
breaking windows.
Getting
“rocked,” as locomotive engineers call it, is so common on the
Northeast Corridor that trains long had metal grills over their
windshields to act as armor. These days, thick glass is specifically
designed to withstand the impact of a cinder block. Amtrak officials say
trains are pelted in the neighborhoods around the crash site monthly.
As
officials looked into whether this old problem may have played a part
in the Amtrak crash, federal officials were taking steps to try to
improve safety along the Northeast Corridor, the nation’s busiest
passenger rail line. On Saturday, the Federal Railroad Administration
announced that it had instructed Amtrak to increase the use of
technology that would have automatically slowed the train before it
could derail. The system is currently in use only in portions of the
rail system.
The technology, called automatic train control,
measures the speed of a passing train and alerts the engineer if the
train is moving too fast. If the engineer does not slow the train, it
applies the brakes.
The
system is in use on Amtrak’s southbound tracks near the crash site, a
rail yard northeast of Philadelphia known as Frankford Junction, but a
federal official familiar with the investigation, who spoke on the
condition of anonymity, said it was not in place on the northbound
tracks because trains headed south had to decelerate more drastically at
the curve.
Automatic
train control is less sophisticated than the positive train control
system that federal regulators have said must be installed on all
passenger railways. Positive train control uses global positioning
system technology to track a train’s location, and can enforce any speed
limit. Seven years ago, Congress mandated that positive train control
be in place around the country by the end of 2015, but is considering a
delay until 2020 — a move urged by passenger and freight rail officials —
because its rollout has been a challenge.
The
Federal Railroad Administration on Saturday also ordered Amtrak to beef
up safety signage and to analyze all stretches of track along the
Northeast Corridor where trains must slow down for a curve to determine
if safety can be improved.
“These
are just initial steps, but we believe they will immediately improve
safety for passengers on the Northeast Corridor,” Sarah Feinberg, the
acting administrator of the agency, said in a statement. “As we learn
more from the ongoing investigation of this derailment, we will take
additional steps and enforcement actions as necessary.”
Railroad tracks are private property where trespassers are supposed to be controlled by transit police patrols.
But
residents of North Philadelphia say old fencing in their deteriorating
neighborhoods provides easy access to the rails, where the police rarely
venture. Bottles, bricks, tires, old bicycles, cinder blocks and other
urban detritus pile up by the tracks, along with people who have nowhere
else to go.
“Bums
be a lot back there, stumbling around all high,” said Carmen Marie, a
lifelong resident, “crackheads, folks shooting up, doing whatever they
do, throwing things.”
She
pointed across Glenwood Avenue to a shadowy, glass-strewn vacant lot,
where rusty fencing topped with razor wire had broad gaps that entered
into the graffiti-covered corridors of the railroad right of way.
Homeless people live along the tracks, she said.
Around midnight, after the National Transportation Safety Board
announced its findings, a reporter was able to walk onto the tracks
through broken fences and some places with no fence at all. Besides
drifts of trash that lay thick along the rails, and the spent cardboard
tubing of flying fireworks, were tons of fist-size rocks that make up
the railway ballast, offering an endless supply of ammunition for
would-be rock throwers.
The
problem is not limited to Philadelphia or urban centers, engineers say,
and usually does little damage, but the impact can be disorienting.
“I’ve
had a brick in the windshield before,” Doug Riddell, a retired Amtrak
engineer in Ashland, Va., said in a telephone interview Friday. “It
scares you. It’s like a bomb going off. It startles you. Suddenly, you
can’t see in front of you.”
Hurled projectiles have been a problem in North Philadelphia for generations.
In 1905, a three-pound iron plumb bob hit a train carrying President Theodore Roosevelt
in the stretch where Amtrak 188 apparently was hit, and “crashed
through the stained-glass transom,” according to a New York Times
article from the time. Railway officials at the time said stones often
hit the train in the area, sometimes injuring passengers.
The president “passed it off as the wanton act of an irresponsible person,” but quickly had the curtains drawn.
A spate of projectiles apparently hit trains in North Philadelphia the night of the crash.
A
Trenton-bound Septa regional commuter train was struck around 9:12 p.m.
near the North Philadelphia station, breaking the windshield and
disabling the train.
Alfred
Price, a documentary filmmaker, was in the train’s front car when he
heard a loud boom and felt the train come to a stop. No one was injured,
but when passengers knocked on the door of the engineer’s compartment,
the engineer emerged dazed, Mr. Price said in a telephone interview on
Friday. “The window was smashed. It was shattered,” he said. “He didn’t
really know what was going on. He was in shock.”
As the Septa passengers waited for a replacement train, they watched Train 188 pass by.
Investigators have said that Train 188 was traveling at 106 miles an hour
— more than twice the speed limit — moments before the crash. They
announced Friday that they had found a fist-size circular area of impact
on the left side of the train’s windshield. Officials said the F.B.I.
had been called in to help with a forensic investigation.
Shortly
before the crash — and after the Septa train was hit by an object — a
southbound Amtrak Acela train was also hit by a projectile, shattering a
side passenger window.
Passengers told Philadelphia magazine
that the impact had happened north of the North Philadelphia station,
the same area where, investigators say, Amtrak Train 188 might have been
hit.
At
a news conference on Friday, Robert L. Sumwalt, a transportation safety
board official who is leading the investigation in to the crash, said
that an assistant conductor had reported that shortly before the crash
she believed she had heard a radio exchange between Mr. Bostian, the
engineer of Train 188, and the engineer on the Septa train regarding
projectiles. The conductor, who was working in the cafe car — the last
in a seven-car train — said that the Septa engineer reported his train
had been “hit by a rock or shot at” and she believed that Mr. Bostian
replied that his train had been struck, too. Seconds later, the
conductor said she heard a rumbling and felt the train leaning as her
car went over on its side.
Earlier in the week, Mayor Michael Nutter dismissed the significance of other trains being hit by objects, telling CNN on Wednesday, “different place, different train, nothing to do with this tragedy here.”
But
Mark Rosenker, a former N.T.S.B. chairman, said the impact from a
thrown object could have affected the engineer and led to the crash.
“He
could have been startled to a point of distraction to lose situational
awareness and forget that he was supposed to slow down instead of
accelerating,” Mr. Rosenker said in an interview Friday.
A spokeswoman for the mayor declined to comment, saying, “There is nothing more for him to say on this matter.”
Karl
Edler, a retired engineer who drove the line hundreds of times, said an
impact could help explain the wreck. When a train pulls out of the
North Philadelphia station, the engineer usually twists the throttle “up
to notch eight, which is engineer-speak for wide open,” he said.
It is about three miles to the curve where Amtrak 188 derailed.
“Usually,
you just leave the throttle open until you get up to 80 miles per hour,
then put on the brake for the curve,” he said. “Seems reasonable that
something happened right about that time he would have started slowing
down that kept him from taking the throttle off. He was startled by the
impact or whatever. And by the time he realized it, it was too late.”
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