Amtrak engineer voiced concerns about safety

2 killed, 100 hurt in Sunday train crash

The Amtrak engineer killed when his train slammed into a parked freight train in South Carolina had told his brother he was worried about dying on the rails.

Rich Kempf told the New York Daily News that his brother, Michael Kempf, had expressed safety concerns after several recent train crashes and Amtrak budget cuts.

“Me and him always talked about this,” Rich Kempf, who lives in Mesa, Arizona, told the paper. “He was voicing concerns about getting killed.”

Michael Kempf, 54, of Savannah, Georgia, died Sunday when Miamibound Amtrak Train 91 out of New York rear-ended an empty CSX train in Cayce, South Carolina, 10 miles south of Columbia, authorities said.

Also killed was the Amtrak train’s conductor, Michael Cella, 36, of Orange Park, Florida.

More than 100 people were injured, and eight of them remained hospitalized Monday.

The wreck came just days after a chartered train for Republican members of Congress heading to a retreat collided with a garbage truck in rural Virginia, killing the truck driver. In December, three people died and dozens were injured outside Seattle when 13 Amtrak train cars derailed and dangled off a bridge.

Michael Kempf, a married father of three, was an Army veteran who had worked for more than a decade in the rail industry, first at CSX and then at Amtrak. Rich Kempf told the Daily News his brother had been looking after their mother since their father died 12 years ago.

Cella, a married father of two, was soft-spoken and always smiling, friend Michael Callanan told wistv.com. Callanan described Cella as a family man and said Cella had recently bought a house.

The crash occurred on a side track, and Amtrak CEO Richard Anderson said it was not clear why the Amtrak train was diverted off the main rails.

The signal system, operated by CSX, was not functioning, and the train’s movements were being managed by a CSX dispatcher, Anderson said.

Investigators have focused on the switch that sent the southbound Amtrak train onto a siding where the CSX train was parked.