Category Archives: Train collission

ASSOCIATED PRESS on the Oxnard train crash: Life-saving train design is rarely used

Repost from The Vallejo Times-Herald

Life-saving train design is rarely used

By Justin Pritchard, Feb 25, 2015 12:37 PM PST                                            
AP Photo
In this Tuesday, Feb. 24, 2015, file photo, Workers stand near a Metrolink train that hit a truck and then derailed in Oxnard, Calif. Three cars of the Metrolink train tumbled onto their sides, injuring dozens of people in the town 65 miles northwest of Los Angeles. Engineers have figured how to blunt the deadly force of a train smashing into a truck on the tracks. Yet few U.S. rail systems have adopted the technology, which is believed to have played a significant role in the remarkably low number of serious injuries from Tuesday’s commuter rail crash in California. (AP Photo/Mark J. Terrill, File)

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the collision between a Southern California commuter train and a truck abandoned on the tracks was this: No one died and only eight people on board were admitted to hospitals.

Officials with the Metrolink train system credit cars designed to blunt the tremendous force of a head-on collision.

Accident investigators have not yet said what role “crash energy management” technology played in Tuesday’s wreck. But the fact that so few among the 50 people on board were seriously injured is prompting other commuter train systems to take a renewed look at safety technology that has been around for at least a decade but still is not widely used in the United States.

A spokesman for Metro-North, the New York City commuter railroad where a fiery collision between an SUV and a train Feb. 3 killed six people, said the California crash will prompt Metro-North “to assess whether the system could be beneficial in enhancing safety.”

It is not clear whether the technology would have made a difference in the most recent Metro-North crash, in which more than 400 feet of electrified third rail snapped into a dozen sections and speared the train. The Metro-North passenger cars meet federal design standards but do not include crash energy management systems, spokesman Aaron Donovan said in a statement.

Back in California, Metrolink officials are crediting crash energy management, which was designed and built into three of the four double-decker passenger cars involved in the accident, with the remarkably low number of serious injuries even though the impact at an estimated 55 mph was violent enough to fling several cars onto their sides.

“Safe to say it would have been much worse without it,” Metrolink spokesman Jeff Lustgarten said of how the technology performed during the crash in Oxnard, about 65 miles northwest of Los Angeles.

The safety systems can vary in design, but the general idea is to disperse the energy of a crash away from where the passengers sit. Metrolink’s cars have collapsible “crush zones” at the ends of its cars that help absorb the impact, along with shock absorbers, bumpers and couplers.

It is the same principle at work in the “crumple zones” in newer cars. They are designed to absorb the force of a crash while keeping people inside safe.

Nearly a decade ago, the U.S. secretary of transportation stood at the site of a horrendous Metrolink crash near downtown Los Angeles and called for the widespread adoption of this kind of train car.

In response to that 2005 accident in which a train smashed into an SUV in Glendale, killing 11 people, Metrolink bought dozens of new passenger cars equipped with these systems.

In 2010, the first of those cars rolled into use. By June 2013, the system had 137 of the cars – about two-thirds of its fleet – bought for $263 million from South Korea’s Hyundai Rotem Inc., Metrolink spokesman Scott Johnson said.

While federal regulators for years have weighed rules that might require the technology, they have not formally proposed such measures for trains with a top speed of less than 125 mph. Rules are in place for a small subset of trains that can go faster.

Aside from Metrolink, crash energy management equipment is used by Amtrak, including on its Acela line in the Northeast, and two systems in Texas, according to the Federal Railroad Administration.

One obstacle to more widespread use of the train technology is that it has to be designed into new passenger cars, and railroads that bought cars without it in recent years may not want to invest in new ones so soon. Railroads can’t simply retrofit existing cars.

“It is not a bolt-on device,” said Martin Schroeder, chief technology officer for the American Public Transportation Association. He has been working with the Federal Railroad Administration as it considers whether to propose rules for the systems.

The advisory committee on which he sat finished its work in 2010. The Federal Railroad Administration would not comment Wednesday on the status of possible regulations.

Meanwhile, federal investigators looking into the Southern California wreck focused on the man who drove his pickup truck onto the tracks, then abandoned it as the train approached before dawn. Jose Alejandro Sanchez-Ramirez, 54, was arrested on suspicion of leaving the scene of an accident.

Ron Bamieh, an attorney for Ramirez, said his client did all he could to try to free the truck, then ran for help. But National Transportation Safety Board member Robert Sumwalt said late Tuesday that the truck was not stuck in the sense that it bottomed out on the tracks. He also noted that its emergency brake was on.

Associated Press writers Jim Fitzgerald in White Plains, New York, and researcher Jennifer Farrar in New York contributed to this story.

Another derailment: Fifty hurt when Southern California commuter train slams into truck

Repost from Reuters
[Editor: Significant quote: “…in a move that may have helped avert a more catastrophic accident, the train used an emergency braking system moments before impact, and the rail cars had safety features that helped absorb the energy of the crash….”  It’s a good thing that safety improvements in commuter cars are well ahead of those for hazmat tank cars.  – RS]

Fifty hurt when Southern California commuter train slams into truck

By Michael Fleeman, OXNARD, Calif. Tue Feb 24, 2015 5:40pm EST
An aerial view shows the scene of a double-decker Metrolink train derailment in Oxnard, California February 24, 2015.   REUTERS-Lucy Nicholson
An aerial view shows the scene of a double-decker Metrolink train derailment in Oxnard, California February 24, 2015. Credit: Reuters/Lucy Nicholson

(Reuters) – A Los Angeles-bound commuter train slammed into a produce truck apparently stuck on the tracks in a Southern California city before dawn on Tuesday, injuring 50 people in a fiery crash, some of them critically.

The truck driver, who was not hurt, left the scene of the destruction in Oxnard on foot and was found walking and disoriented one or two miles away, Assistant Police Chief Jason Benitez said.

Benitez said the 54-year-old driver from Arizona was not arrested but investigators were trying to determine if there was any criminal wrongdoing in the 5:45 a.m. PST (8:45 a.m EST) wreck, which overturned three double-decker Metrolink rail cars. Two others derailed but remained upright.

While no-one was killed, the force of the impact ripped the truck apart and left burned-out chunks and twisted wreckage still smoldering hours later.

Benitez said it appeared that the truck driver had taken a wrong turn in the pre-dawn darkness and ended up on the tracks, where the rig became stuck as the train approached at 79 miles per hour.

But in a move that may have helped avert a more catastrophic accident, the train used an emergency braking system moments before impact, and the rail cars had safety features that helped absorb the energy of the crash, Metrolink spokesman Jeff Lustgarten said.

“I think we can safely say that the technology worked. It definitely minimized the impact. It would have been a very serious collision, it would have been much worse without it,” Lustgarten said.

The crash came three weeks after a Metro-North commuter train struck a car at a crossing outside New York City and derailed in a fiery accident that killed six people.

TRAIN OPERATOR CRITICAL

Ventura County Emergency Medical Services administrator Steve Carroll said 50 people were hurt in the Oxnard incident, 28 of whom were transported to hospitals.

Among the most seriously injured was the train’s operator, who was in critical condition in the intensive care unit at Ventura County Medical Center, hospital spokeswoman Sheila Murphy said.

The operator, who has not been publicly identified, suffered extensive chest injuries affecting his heart and lungs but was able to communicate with doctors, Murphy said.

National Transportation Safety Board Member Robert Sumwalt said investigators would examine the train’s recorders and seek to determine if crossing arms and bells were functioning properly.

“We are concerned with grade crossing accidents. We intend to use this accident and others to learn from it so that we can keep it from happening again,” Sumwalt said.

The incident took place where the Metrolink tracks cross busy Rice Avenue in Oxnard, a street used by a steady stream of big rigs and farm trucks and lined with warehouses and farmland.

“It is a very dangerous crossing,” said Rafael Lemus, who works down the street from the crash site. “The lights come on too late before the trains come. It is not safe.”

A Ventura County Medical Center spokeswoman said the hospital had received nine victims, three of whom were listed in critical condition.

Los Robles Hospital & Medical Center received six patients with minor injuries such as back, leg or shoulder pain, said spokeswoman Kris Carraway. St. John’s Pleasant Valley Hospital in nearby Camarillo was treating two patients for minor injuries, a spokeswoman said.

The wreck triggered major delays to Metrolink lines across Ventura County, forcing commuters onto buses. Oxnard is an affluent coastal city of some 200,000 about 45 miles northwest of Los Angeles.

In 2008, a crowded Metrolink commuter train plowed into a Union Pacific locomotive in Chatsworth, California, killing 25 people and injuring 135 in an accident officials blamed on the commuter train engineer’s failure to stop at a red light.

In 2005 a Metrolink train struck a sport utility vehicle parked on the tracks in the Los Angeles suburb of Glendale, killing 11 people and injuring 180.

(Reporting by Michael Fleeman in Oxnard, Laila Kearney, Barbara Goldberg and James Dalgleish in New York, Rory Carroll in San Francisco, Eric Johnson in Seattle and Eric Kelsey and Dan Whitcomb in Los Angeles; Writing by Dan Whitcomb; Editing by Jeffrey Benkoe, Bill Trott and James Dalgleish)