GPS could have helped prevent deadly crash
Amtrak train was sent down side track in error.
CAYCE, S. C.—Federal investigators spent a second day Mondayat the site of a deadly train crash in South Carolina, where an Amtrak train was mistakenly sent offff a main track and down a side spur — and into a parked freight train. The ensuing crash early Sunday killed two people and injured more than 100 passengers.
The investigation headed by the National Transportation Safety Board could take years, but federal investigators are already focusing on one critical factor: that a switch, set manually, may have caused the passenger train to barrel down the wrong track.
Moreover, authorities say the crash could have been prevented with aGPS- based system called “positive train control,” which knows the location of all trains and the positions of all switches in an area and is designed to prevent two trains from traveling on the same track at the same time.
“It could have avoided this accident. That’s what it’s designed to do,” said National Transportation Safety Board Chairman Robert Sumwalt.
Regulators have demanded the implementation of positive train control fordecades, and the technology is nowin place in the Northeast, but railroads that operate tracks used by Amtrak elsewhere in the U.S. have won repeated extensions from the government. The deadline for installing such equipment is now the end of 2018.
CSX Corp. — the freight railroad operator that runs that stretch of track — issued a statement expressing condolences but said nothing about the cause.
“Business as usual must end,” Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut said after this latest crash.
Sumwalt said the passenger train hurtled downa side track near Cayce ( CAY see) around 2:45 a.m. Sunday after a stop 10miles north in Columbia because a switch had been locked in place, diverting it from the main line. A crew on the freight train had moved the switch to drive it from one side track — where it unloaded 34 train cars of automobiles — to the side track where it was parked. The switch was padlocked as itwas supposed to be, Sumwalt said.
The system that operates the train signals in the area was down, so CSX dispatchers were operating them manually. Sumwalt said it was too early to knowif the signal was red to warn the Amtrak crew that the switch wasnot set tocontinue along the main train line.
Just hours after Sunday’s crash, which also sent 116 of the 147 people on board the New York- to- Miami train to the hospital, Amtrak President Robert Anderson said there must be no more delays fromthe federal government in installing the safety system by the end of 2018.
He deferred to investigators about whether the system would have stopped this crash. “Theoretically, an operative PTC system would include switches in addition to signals, so it would cover both speed and switches,” Anderson said.
The Silver Star was going an estimated 59mph when it struck the freight train, Gov. Henry McMaster said.