Daily Local News (West Chester, PA)
SEPTA train operator critical after 69th Street derailment
UPPER DARBY >> A SEPTA operator was critically injured Tuesday morning when a westbound SEPTA Market-Frankfort Line train derailed after it collided with a stopped train at 69th Street Terminal.
Seven cars were at least partially derailed, injuring four people — two operators and two passengers — around 8:10 a.m.
SEPTA Assistant General Man-
ager Scott Sauer said that Train 67 was waiting in queue for the station to clear when the westboundtraveling Train 57 hit it on the turnaround loop.
Four cars from Train 57 derailed, and three cars from Train 67 derailed. Additionally, a third train was impacted when a car from the colliding train derailed onto the adjacent track.
The operator of Train 57 was listed in critical condition at Lankenau Hospital.
Additionally, the operator of Train 67 and two passengers were also injured. Officials said two injured were taken to Lankenau and two were taken to Delaware County Memorial Hospital.
The injured were not identified.
“The other injuries were non-life threatening,” Sauer said.
Trains traveling westbound to 69th Street Terminal use the turnaround loop to continue the journey eastbound back to Frankford. Typically passengers would all have exited at 69th Street Station before traveling around the loop.
Sauer said in the preliminary investigation it wasn’t clear why passengers were still aboard. He indicated
that the trains were “nonrevenue trains” which means they were not meant for carrying passengers.
“There were a couple passengers, we’re not sure why they were there,” Sauer said.
The derailment came at the peak of the morning commute, sending hundreds of commuters scrambling to the shuttle buses that SEPTA instituted to fill in the gaps of service between 63rd Street Station to the 69th Street Terminal.
Frank Duff, 85, of Clifton Heights, who was waiting patiently for the shuttle service Tuesday morning, said he regularly rides the transit service, but the frequent issues that have plagued SEPTA in the last year — the strike, cracks to the train car carriage, and now the derailment — hasn’t negatively impacted his opinion of the service.
“I haven’t been inconvenienced. I love SEPTA,” Duff said. “I just think the age of the trains have taken a toll — they look nice, but they’re getting old.”
The M4 trains that comprise the Market-Frankford Line were built and delivered by ADTranz between 1996 and 1999. They were the first heavy rail cars in SEPTA’s fleet that offered electronic designation signs.
Tuesday evening, work to re-rail the train cars was put on hold as SEPTA awaited the arrival of the
National Transportation Safety Board from Washington, D.C., to take over the investigation.
Three trains and 18 total cars were impacted in the Tuesday morning collision, further making the already diminished MFL fleet even more strained. Earlier in the month SEPTA announced that a number of M4 trains, which comprise the MFL fleet, showed signs of fractures in the car body bolster beams.
“It certainly doesn’t help,” Sauer said of the diminished fleet of available trains.
Officials said as of last week SEPTA was back to “21 or 22” full trains, which was short of the 24 trains that make up a “full complement.”
It was discovered early in the month that cracks in the M4 vent box, which provides air to the traction motors, on at least two instances had spread to the load-bearing car body bolster beam.
Bauer said there was no indication that these pre-existing issues were any way involved in the collision. Previously, SEPTA General Manager Jeff Knueppel said that all trains on the tracks would have passed the necessary inspections.
After the collision Tuesday, Sauer said SEPTA would leave nothing unturned as a regimen of yellow-vested inspectors analyzed the damage.
“They go through a pretty vigorous post-accident inspection. We look at braking, lights, operators indicators, signals, all of that,” Sauer said.
SEPTA previously had two derailments with injuries on the Market-Frankford Line.
On Dec. 26, 1961, one man was killed and 38 others sustained non-lifethreatening injuries when four cars derailed north of the York-Dauphin Station.
On March 7, 1990, four people were killed and 162 were injured when four cars derailed between 15th Street Station and 30th Street Station.
Bauer went into detail on the safety precautions that have been put in place to avoid accidents. A combination of the automatic train control signal system, which is meant to automatically stop trains and prevent them from collisions or violating signals, and wayside signals — red light, yellow light — should have indicated to the operator that the train was stopped in the loop.
“The automated system, it’s sort of like positive train control, but it’s not quite that advanced,” Sauer said. “It’s coded into the track and it’s setup so certain blocks read what’s on the tracks, it gives the signals to the operator.
“If there’s a stopped train, there’s something that should say a train is on the tracks.”