Everyone slept

Metro-north complacency fatal flaw

Everyone knows by now that MetroNorth train engineer William (Billy) Rockefeller nodded off on the job. He wasn’t the only one. The same apparently can be said of railroad management and the federal overseers who were jolted out of their slumber by Metro-North’s Bloody Sunday.

Four people are dead and more than 60 injured because a Metro-North Railroad express train flew off the rails in the Riverdale section of the Bronx as it raced around a 30 mph curve at approximately 82 mph.

The most immediate cause of the Dec. 1 accident is Rockefeller. For some unexplained reason, he slipped into a daze, he told investigators. He wasn’t up all night. He wasn’t on his cell phone. He hadn’t been smoking anything funny or boozing it up. He simply zoned out, he said.

The tragedy near the Spuyten Duyvil station wouldn’t have happened if the signal system had been modified to detect and activate the emergency brakes on an out-of-control train heading for the bend.

The Federal Railroad Administration in 2002 ordered that all new trains be equipped with modern overspeed protection technology, an MTA official said. But it didn’t order existing trains be retrofitted, an official said.

Since Metro-North was formed, engineers safely navigated trains around the Spuyten Duyvil curve 1.7 million times before Rockefeller jumped the rails, according to the authority.

Management didn’t identify the curve as a vulnerable spot where safety could and should be enhanced without delay.

On Sunday night, the MTA announced it had finally installed new protections at the curve, which will warn engineers of the approaching speed reduction and automatically apply the train’s emergency brakes if speed is not lowe ered.

If only they’d w woken up earlier.