WASHINGTON — The National Transportation Safety Board will release its report on the December 2017 derailment of an Amtrak Cascades passenger train in Washington state at a meeting on May 21.
The meeting is significant not only because the safety board will report its findings on contributing causes and recommendations for changes, but also because the report’s issuance is a major hurdle to be cleared before Amtrak service is restored to what was then a new line, the Point Defiance Bypass.
The immediate cause of the derailment, which killed three and injured 65, has been established: the train, traveling at 78 miles per hour, could not negotiate a curve on which the speed limit was 30. But the board is likely to go into such subjects as training and familiarity with the route, warning signs of the reduced-speed curve and why the engineer didn’t see or respond to them, the performance of the Talgo trainset in the accident and why positive train control wasn’t up and running.
The 14.5-mile Point Defiance Bypass runs from Tacoma to the Nisqually River delta, where it rejoins the BNSF main line. Owned by Sound Transit and used for its Sounder commuter trains, it was refurbished with an eye toward removing some congestion from the water-level route along the Tacoma Narrows. It was to be used by Amtrak Cascades service in the Vancouver, B.C.-Eugene, Ore. corridor, and by the Coast Starlight. Tacoma’s passenger service was to shift from a one-story brick building opened in 1984 to Freighthouse Square, a renovated Milwaukee Road building. The Washington State Department of Transportation, a prime financial supporter of the service, had hoped to add more Cascades round trips on the corridor by using the bypass.
Amtrak train No. 501 was the first revenue-service train on the line when, southbound from Tacoma, it derailed on the southern portion of the line at a bridge over Interstate 5 near DuPont at 7:34 a.m. Dec. 18. Since then Amtrak’s trains have remained on the mainline route (commuter trains don’t go as far as the derailment site and weren’t affected) and call at the older Tacoma depot.
“Once the final NTSB report is issued, WSDOT and others involved with the service will assess the recommendations to determine next steps for returning the Amtrak Cascades and Coast Starlight service to the Point Defiance Bypass,” the department says on its website, adding that it doesn’t know what those recommendations will be. In the meantime, PTC has been installed and tested on the bypass.
The NTSB hearing, to convene at 1 p.m., will be live streamed at ntsb.windrosemedia.com.
A question I have is: I gather that the locomotive was a ‘U.S.’ loco, not a Talgo design. If the loco used had been a much lighter Talgo loco, would the train not have gone off the rails so easily? Could the sheer weight (and higher center of gravity?) of the loco used, through inertia, have ‘pulled’ the rest of the train off the rails? Would a Talgo loco, because of the increased ability of a Talgo train to take curves at a higher speed, have stayed on the tracks? Going 80 on a 30 curve might still have caused the Talgo loco to go off the rails, but I’m curious what might have been the alternative results.
Of course weight alone is not the perfect cure to safe design. But the traditional US crash standard, which required the car body to survive essentially 1,000,000 pounds pressure from impact over the draw bar was remarkably strong. By contrast the European standard assumed the vestibule area would compress and the body of the car survive.
In the DuPont tragedy the key to the degree of destruction suffered by the cars seems to have been their separation over the articulated trucks and the failure of their non traditional couplings, which were apparently at least partially some sort of cables.
One feature of US coupling standards is the use of tight lock couplers on mainline passenger equipment intended to operate at higher speeds. These are much less likely to break in a derailment. Train 501 might have better stayed in line if it had not broken apart as it went down the embankment.
A look at the aerial photos at DuPont shows that the train suffered multiple separations. The engine and the front cars went down the embankment in the direction of travel and to the right of the bridges. The fatalities took place in car 7504, which was demolished on that side as it descended. But other cars jumped the railing of the bridge and ended up on the highway to the left and at least one upside down. If the train had remained coupled there is at least a chance cars would not have stacked on each other, nor ended up upside down.
Of course bodies flying around inside would still have sustained severe injuries. But things would have been far more survivable if the detached wheel set had not effectively de-roofed car 7504 and if the side of the car body had remained intact. This does not generally happen to US standard cars.
We can take limited comfort from how many riders did survive the horrible progress of this accident. But we shouldn’t simply dismiss the NTSB’s warnings. And I say this again as someone who long argued US standards were too severe.
No design is perfect against an accident as severe as DuPont. But we need to think very carefully about what happened there and particularly consider its implications for future train-sets.
Are the new Avelia Liberty cars being built for 150mph + speeds on the NEC more likely to survive this sort of crash? They meet our newly revised standards. Should there be some reassessment of these in light of DuPont? Or is there no relevance to the Talgo 6 design and the new US standard? I don’t know the answer to any of this, but think the questions are worth posing.
Of course traditional US cars can be totally compromised in worse case crashes. This befell at least one Amfleet coach that got wrapped around a steel and concrete catenary mast in the Philadelphia NEC derailment. In the Silver Star South Carolina accident an Amfleet II lounge car was bent to a lazy “L” shape. But in that cornfield meet disaster the deaths were all in the Amtrak locomotive cab.
We have traditionally had the highest crash survival car standards in the world. Of course technology evolves, as do safety appliances like PTC.
The Washington tragedy was unambiguously the result of human errors. But we need to honestly assess what role the train’s cars played in the results that befell its riders.
Better training, PTC, better supervision, etc will all probably preclude another derailment at the DuPont curve, but the question of equipment integrity is a very fair issue to discuss and to try within reason to mitigate.
The NTSB Report is out and it is very deeply concerning.
So many sources for this catastrophe. A few observations. I had actually discussed the 30mph curve with my friend Jim Hamre, who died in the crash. Jim had retired from the Washington DOT several years prior and was a highly experienced highway engineer. He explained that the Stimulus Funding that paid for the new route was not sufficient to cover what WashDOT projected could have been what he said could have reached a $60,000,000 total cost to realign not only the curve, but to also rebuild the two bridges over I 5 and to reconfigure the entire approach alignment from the north. Hideous irony? A cost that somehow should have been embraced?
Of course error by the engineer, lack of adequate pre-trip training, failure to have a train-master or other Amtrak supervisor in the cab, grossly excess speed, etc caused the crash. Fate is complex.
But we must not skirt around the catastrophic failure of the Talgo train-set. The wheel-set that essentially ripped asunder the car my friends Jim and Zach were riding in was part of an articulation between cars. It is horrifying to think that this flying truck could essentially de-roof and destroy the side-wall of a entire coach, thus sending the unfortunate riders in its path airborne out of the car to their traumatic fate.
I have long loved the comfort, sophistication, ride and style of the Talgo train-sets, but if the NTSB is right the time is now to retire the three remaining crash-standard wavered sets, and to add the never-used, stored, but fully US compliant Wisconsin sets to the two compliant sets in the northwest equipment pool, modified as needed to add Business Class seating and a nicer cafe.
This would give the Cascades Corridor four usable Talgo train-sets, against a need for five to cover current schedules with a reserve for servicing. Already one Seattle-Vancouver trip is run using a Superliner set. This reflects an existing shortfall of one Talgo set due to the repairs needed as a result of the much less severe derailment on the Point Defiance line, when an engineer overshot an actual derail on the approach to the Steilacoom draw bridge. The needed reserve could be met that way, or by allocating the back-up Amfleet set from southern California–or even Horizon fleet from the midwest.
More cars will be available fairly soon when the new Siemans fleet is delivered for midwest and California service–thus freeing up Amfleet/Horizon, even ex-NJ Transit upgraded cars. Not ideal, nor as stylish, but safer until Washington and Oregon can somehow find the funds to order new cars. If the current sets are to stay in service they must be strengthened/modified in some way to reduce the chance of another Dupont on the countless curves along the Cascades route.
I am advised elsewhere that the Talgo set damaged at the Steilacoom draw bridge is back in service. This still does not change the reality that only four fully US crash compliant sets exist, if the Wisconsin units are brought to the Cascades route.
The interview between the NTSB and the engineer of Train 501 has been made available for viewing on the Internet for quite some time. On Page 51, lines 18-21, the engineer said the following:
“I realized that, when I saw the 30-mile-an-hour speed sign at the beginning of the curve, that I was not where I thought I was . . .”
My conclusion, in reading this and other testimony, is that the engineer did not have adequate training in familiarizing himself with the new subdivision. He knew the curve was “out there,” but it appears he didn’t know EXACTLY where.
An addendum to my previous post:
Another feature of the NTSB interview transcripts that convinces me that training was inadequate for the employees was the testimony of the qualifying conductor who was on the head-end of the train. It was painfully obvious in his testimony that he couldn’t tell how to identify the difference between an intermediate signal and an absolute signal. He also testified that he had in his possession an employee timetable for the subdivision (that lists the 30 MPH restriction for the curve) and further testified that he was unaware of the 30 MPH curve.
Much as Americans hate them seat belts may need to be installed on trains. I genuinely want to know what happened on Amtrak 501. No vehicle is perfectly safe. The DuPont crash was just about the most destructive imaginable. Obviously gross employee error caused the accident, but it’s only sensible to try to analyze what might have caused the fatalities and what might mitigate that in the future.
Statistics do not show cars to be more survivable than rail, but certainly design has improved the safety of both modes. I don’t want the Talgos banned. I do think we need answers as to the level of crash impact sustained in the DuPont crash. Did the cars on the train perform as expected?
The NTSB report will be very important. I’m not looking to prejudge. I do want to know what happened and if sensible things can be done to reduce similar impact injuries in the future. Or was this just terrible chance? We’ll know much more next week.
Any automobile (or bus) accident at 78 MPH is likely to be fatal – even with seat belts and airbags. I do share Carl Fowler’s concerns about what could and should be made safer in a high speed train accident.
CARL – I find it ironic that many in the transit advocacy community are so down on automobiles. In crash situations automobiles have become more survivable over the years — rear shoulder belts, more airbags, better child seat latching, and other improvements. What have been the corresponding improvements in train cars? About the only improvement that comes to mind (following the Amtrak crash in Maryland thirty years ago) was slightly increased restraint of luggage in the overhead shelf.
As I read your post, rail passenger saftey seems to be about the structural integrity of the railcar shell. Within that shell it seems to be just fine if passengers are tossed about and their heads, abdomens and limbs bounce off this that or the other fixed object.
On my last train ride, which was on a Metra gallery car, I contemplated what would happen in a crash and how it could be improved. The gallery car was full of hard surfaces – weapons to to speak – in every direction – stanchions, posts, railings, etc. The seats give no support whatsoever should the car lurch in any given direction. Standing and walking about while the train is moving are all part of the equation.And of course no seat belts or air bags.
As a part of this contemplation I wondered what could be done to improve the situation. Every answer I came up with woiuld reduce the capacity of the Metra train by 50 percent. (And these improvements would be only partial solutions.) In other words, it won’t happen.
As I read this forum every day, it becomes more and more clear to me that the advantage of automobiles and airplanes over rail has tended to increase over the years. Given all the variables rail has shrunk to a niche market that is not expanding. One of those variables has been safety. Southwest Airlines has killed two people in its entire history (one passenger, one on the ground). Similar safety records can be found on some of the Asian or Mideast airlines. In contrast Amtrak with a very much smaller number of passenger miles has had a number of fatalities.
Two of the three passengers who perished at Dupont were best friends of mine, Jim Hamre (the brother I never had) and Zach Wilhoite. It was inconceivable that I, living in Vermont, should know two of the three victims of a crash in Washington state so well. But I lived there 1981-1987 and retained many friends–but alas fewer now!
Indeed I met Jim Hamre in 1981 while we were mutually leafleting to save and improve the Seattle-Portland Amtrak Corridor. He devoted much of the next 30 years to accomplishing that as a founder and officer of both the Washington Association of Rail Passengers and NARP. And then to die on the first trip over the new line? The force of destiny is too cruel!
Although Zach was much younger, he too had been a devoted advocate for the project. Both were transport professionals too. Jim had retired from a long career in the Washington DOT as an engineer and software manager on the highway side of the agency, while Zach was a computer/scheduling specialist for Washington’s Pierce Transit bus service. But fundamentally they both understood balanced public transportation and passionately backed the rail as well as the highway mode. They had shown their commitment to state of the art rail when they paid their own way to attend the great rail trade show, Innotrans, in Berlin, Germany earlier in 2017.
I will be particularly interested if the report indicates anything about how they died and where they were on the train when it so hideously derailed. This concern is not maudlin.
The train-set assigned to Amtrak 501 on December 18, 2017 was a wavered non-US crash compliant Talgo unit. This means it had been exempted (by a proper review process at the time) from the highly demanding crash safety rules normally applying to US-built equipment. This is significant because the FRA has recently modified US regulations to more broadly permit European crash-compliance standards on US train-sets newly built.
My friends very possibly may have been at the large widows in a vestibule area of their car, preparing to photograph the merger of the new By-pass line with the usual Point Defiance mainline at Nisqually Junction, which means they could easily have been thrown away from the train when the cars broke apart at the vestibule/shared truck point. If so the Talgo waiver may have been justified. But if they were in their seats then a very serious issue opens to understand why they (and one other unfortunate fellow) alone among the 80+ riders/staff perished. Both died of massive head trauma. I know that Jim Hamre, at least, was found on the ground outside the train. We also know that at least one coach was literally stripped of its roof by the impact.
I long felt US crash standards artificially constrained the ability of Amtrak and other carriers to acquire state of the art equipment at reasonable prices. But this may prove me not only wrong, but tragically so. I think about this virtually every day. Beware of your own certainties.
Moreover the last four Talgo sets delivered (the two for Oregon and the two never-used sets intended for Chicago-Milwaukie-Madison, Wisonsinn service) do meet US standards, so Talgo clearly can do it with respect to traditional US crash compliance. But at least five wavered train-sets remain active daily in the Cascades pool. Worse Amtrak is so deeply short of cars that in the short-term it would be virtually impossible to replace them.
I believe the Avelia Liberty high-speed sets being built for the NEC fall under the new standards. This matter cries out to be closely followed. We may have made an horrific mistake and if so we need to act soon to prevent an even worse catastrophe on a packed NEC service traveling at 150 mph–not 78mph. For now I simply mourn two great friends who died far too soon.
Carl Fowler
Rail Passengers Association
Vice Chair
(These views are my own)
Any engineer that had been over the route once and been paying attention at all would have noticed this curve going over the freeway. It is only place where it does in the Tacoma area, and just before it joins the BN main line. I am all for inward facing cameras if it causes engineers to keep their mind on the job.
@M Singer
As was stated many times just after the incident, it is impossible to eliminate that 30 mph curve at that location because of I5 and the surrounding terrain…it would be completely impractical to do so and the cost would be prohibitive.
Must be rushing to make the final touches to the report after 17 months…
The wreck of Amtrak’s #501 brought to a culmination the fact of how Amtrak has lacked a consistently acceptable safety culture, at least since 2005; how unfunded congressional mandates for PTC did not mix well with other congressional/DOT requirements for completion of the bypass route to prevent loss of/payback of funds. Where was Amtrak, Sound Transit, WSDOT, U.S. DOT, and FRA (pre Batory) not to have the experience and judgment to demand that elimination of that 30mph curve?
What should be thoroughly examined in a deep dive to further substantiate the NTSB’s condemnation of Amtrak’s safety culture is how pervasive the history of senior management’s lack of acceptable decision-making has been exposed, including:
1) Assuming no need to keep ATS while PTC was being installed in the Philly area, as no engineer would accelerate thru those tight curves at Frankfort Jct., until the wreck of #188 in May, 2015.
2) Assuming MOW crews communicated to dispatcher who cleared tracks and communicated with passenger trains, until the accident with a MOW hoe/crew of #89 south of Philly in April, 2016..
3) Assuming no need for the cost of extensive training of engineers to become familiar with the route and terrain of the Point Defiance Bypass; and to conduct such training in groups at night, as the cab crews would eventually learn the route–until the wreck of #501 on its first day on the new route in December, 2017.
One has to ponder how different this story would be without the involvement and intervention of so many agencies of the federal and state governments that only exacerbated Amtrak’s emphasis on politics over railroading?