Engineer in crash is a rail safety advocate
The Amtrak engineer on the speeding train that derailed on a curve, killing eight passengers and injuring more than 200 in Philadelphia, is a passionate rail advocate who has supported stronger industry safety standards.
Brandon Bostian, 32, of Queens, N.Y., has been a train aficionado at least since grade school outside Memphis and through his years at the University of Missouri in Columbia in the early 2000s. University dorm roommates recalled him playing on a rail simulator in his room and talking about trains in casual conversation.
It was “trains from the start,” said Lee Allen, 31, who met Bostian in the fifth grade in the Memphis suburb of Bartlett. “We were total dorks; that’s part of why we hung out all the time. He’s one of the nicest guys I’ve met, absolutely dependable and trustworthy.”
After college, Bostian landed a job in the industry he loved, getting work with Amtrak on routes in the San Francisco Bay Area and the heavily trafficked Northeast corridor between Washington and New York City.
Bostian has described himself as a Type A personality enamored of checklists, writing to his friends in one Facebook status: “At work, I run through a five-item checklist after I inspect my engine and before I touch anything. Then a 10-item checklist before I move the train an inch, and another four-item list at every station stop. So I guess it’s no surprise that I keep a checklist for packing a bag for an overnight trip.”
On the rail message board Trainorders.com, where Bostian has posted for more than a decade on wide-ranging issues, he has repeatedly called for improved industry safety measures to prevent engineers’ mistakes.
Jason Gerali, 31, lived across the hall from Bostian in their dorm during their freshman year at the University of Missouri in 2001.
“He was quiet. He was always sitting in front of his computer playing the Microsoft Train Simulator,” Gerali said, “which is funny because it’s so boring. It’s like a flight simulator but you just have to stay on the rails.”
As graduation approached in 2006, Bostian wrote to his fellow aficionados on Trainorders.com that he was trying to get “an amazing job with Amtrak” and that his “ultimate goal is to be a conductor.”
He became an Amtrak conductor in July 2006 and an engineer in 2010, according to a LinkedIn profile under his name.
Bostian’s work took him to the Bay Area, where he worked as an engineer on a Caltrain line in the San Francisco-San Jose corridor operated by Amtrak.
Bostian was involved in the fight against California’s Proposition 8, a same-sex marriage ban passed in 2008, according to the Midtown Gazette. The New York publication interviewed Bostian about his support for samesex marriage shortly after he moved to New York in 2012.
A few hours after Tuesday night’s crash, Bostian changed his Facebook profile picture to a black rectangle as friends swarmed to his side and posted messages of support.
Perhaps the strongest message of support came Wednesday from one friend who lists himself as an Amtrak engineer.
“Hold your head up,” wrote Mark Schulthies. “What you know about yourself and those of us that know you is more important than anything being said in the media. Everyday we hold lives in our hands — 99.9% of the time it goes unappreciated and taken for granted. Yes, it happened to you but it could have been any one of us and you are not alone.”