Northeast Regional 188 - Accident In Philadelphia

jackintosh11 wrote: I believe the shortest NEC trains right now are the 5 car Keystones. I've never seen anything shorter.

Occasionally 4, but I haven't seen a 3 car Keystone since the pre-Keystone improvement project days.

Matt Johnson wrote:

jackintosh11 wrote: I believe the shortest NEC trains right now are the 5 car Keystones. I've never seen anything shorter.

Occasionally 4, but I haven't seen a 3 car Keystone since the pre-Keystone improvement project days.

The Vermonter runs 5-car consists as well. And while Regionals 65/66/67 usually run a 6-car consist (baggage, business class/dinette, 4 coaches), it was running a coach short when I last rode it in August.

Spro wrote above:
[[ First off.. in 7 or 8 months, the NTSB will have a really good idea of the chain of events that set this event in motion, and will tell us then. They will have interviewed all of the train crew, the dispatchers, the signal maintainers, the electrical power supervision people. We will know what time the circuit breakers opened and how may times they tried to automatically reset. We will have a picture of the dispatchers and what they saw and what they knew just before and after the train stopped. ]]

The NTSB report will add next-to-nothing to the explanation or information as to what went wrong.

Amtrak has all the data it needs RIGHT NOW. They had it from the time they downloaded the engine's event recorder, downloaded the video from the witness camera, and the video from the in-cab camera (if indeed the new engines have one).

The "cause" of the derailment is trivial:
The train derailed because it was moving too fast for the curvature involved.
Is there anyone on this forum who will contradict this?

Why the engineman accelerated the train, when he should have been braking, is all that needs to be determined.

Of course, they could just ask him, but he -- after consulting with his lawyer -- has said that he "cannot remember".

The company investigation will probably be held within the next couple of weeks. They usually try to get these done while everything is still fresh in the memory of the employees involved.

But it's not hard to predict the progress of that investigation:
- derailment occured because of excessive speed entering the restriction
- unless forensic evidence can be established that something struck or penetrated the windshield of the engine just prior to that point where the engine began accelerating, they will point towards human error (I doubt that any conclusive evidence will be found regarding the "windshield issue", and thus the windshield sustained damage as a result of the derailment, not prior to it).
- The investigation will not force the engineman to speak against himself. But his insistence that he can't recall the events immediately preceding the wreck won't help his case.
- Without testimony from the engineman (he doesn't remember) the company will rely on the empirical evidence -- again, from the event recorder, witness camera, and (if there is one) the in-cab camera.
- Event recorder will indicate that train began accelerating towards an oncoming restriction when the train's speed should have shown steady and then experiencing a brake application to slow to 50mph. Derailment followed as a matter of course.
- Without testimony from the engineman (if he can't reliably remember events that might incriminate his actions, how can he conversely recall events that might exonerate himself?), the trial investigators will conclude that the train accelerated because of operator error.
- Testimony from other crew members and dispatcher will be heard, but will carry little weight, since only the engineman was actually in the cab to observe events there.
- Blame for accident will be assessed on engineman and he'll get terminated.

Why do folks here think the NTSB investigation is going to reveal anything more than Amtrak already knows, and will establish at the company investigation?

Aside:
Made it through 31 years of being on Amtrak engines wihtout having to go to any investigations, myself. Guess I was lucky...

#1, this curve was not dangerous, and automated speed control was available but not utilized on Amtrak for this curve.

Amtrak had been fine on this curve for a huge multiyear period of time and ran trains constantly on this route. Something changed on this specific day. We know it was an early number new Locomotive, in fact the second one produced for Amtrak.

Amtrak activated automated speed control and positive speed control should be out by year end so this should be an added precaution to prevent such an incident from happening again.

As to cause, its either fully the engineers fault, or mechanical failure of the train including a hacking based event. Amtrak has the locomotive, the recorders and the computer systems. A forensics investigator should have been going over the computer on this locomotive which already has all the answers. If information is not answerable it means Amtrak needs to modify the operating system and software code and do a better job. I agree, it seems Amtrak has the answers or at least knows how to find them and hasn't been completely forthcoming. If a foreign entity manipulated a train, it takes a whole different turn.

Trains can literally self drive themselves if programmed appropriately especially with the control systems of modern transportation vehicles.

I would like to know more about how exhaustion possibly played a role in this accident and how it's been stated in this thread by engineers how Amtrak and other railroads constantly push engineers to their limits by this corporate culture of work more and work longer and harder.

Already we saw this guy had only a one hour break between runs and his previous run was a bit stressful. And supposedly Amtrak has an unwritten rule of one and a half hour break between runs but they ignore that and it seems they prefer a quick as possible turn around to get back out again. Perhaps Amtrak is to blame for this incident IF they pushed this guy to his limits and he was so tired that he lost focus.

I would look to see if he called crew management services and asked for a relief engineer after his previous run without cab signals. And IF he did call was it denied?

Fishrrman wrote:Spro wrote above:
[[ First off.. in 7 or 8 months, the NTSB will have a really good idea of the chain of events that set this event in motion, and will tell us then. They will have interviewed all of the train crew, the dispatchers, the signal maintainers, the electrical power supervision people. We will know what time the circuit breakers opened and how may times they tried to automatically reset. We will have a picture of the dispatchers and what they saw and what they knew just before and after the train stopped. ]]

The NTSB report will add next-to-nothing to the explanation or information as to what went wrong.

Amtrak has all the data it needs RIGHT NOW. They had it from the time they downloaded the engine's event recorder, downloaded the video from the witness camera, and the video from the in-cab camera (if indeed the new engines have one).

The "cause" of the derailment is trivial:
The train derailed because it was moving too fast for the curvature involved.
Is there anyone on this forum who will contradict this?

Why the engineman accelerated the train, when he should have been braking, is all that needs to be determined.

Of course, they could just ask him, but he -- after consulting with his lawyer -- has said that he "cannot remember".

The company investigation will probably be held within the next couple of weeks. They usually try to get these done while everything is still fresh in the memory of the employees involved.

But it's not hard to predict the progress of that investigation:
- derailment occured because of excessive speed entering the restriction
- unless forensic evidence can be established that something struck or penetrated the windshield of the engine just prior to that point where the engine began accelerating, they will point towards human error (I doubt that any conclusive evidence will be found regarding the "windshield issue", and thus the windshield sustained damage as a result of the derailment, not prior to it).
- The investigation will not force the engineman to speak against himself. But his insistence that he can't recall the events immediately preceding the wreck won't help his case.
- Without testimony from the engineman (he doesn't remember) the company will rely on the empirical evidence -- again, from the event recorder, witness camera, and (if there is one) the in-cab camera.
- Event recorder will indicate that train began accelerating towards an oncoming restriction when the train's speed should have shown steady and then experiencing a brake application to slow to 50mph. Derailment followed as a matter of course.
- Without testimony from the engineman (if he can't reliably remember events that might incriminate his actions, how can he conversely recall events that might exonerate himself?), the trial investigators will conclude that the train accelerated because of operator error.
- Testimony from other crew members and dispatcher will be heard, but will carry little weight, since only the engineman was actually in the cab to observe events there.
- Blame for accident will be assessed on engineman and he'll get terminated.

Why do folks here think the NTSB investigation is going to reveal anything more than Amtrak already knows, and will establish at the company investigation?

Aside:
Made it through 31 years of being on Amtrak engines wihtout having to go to any investigations, myself. Guess I was lucky...

Hear me out, it cost Amtrak a lot of money to train this individual first to be a conductor and later on to be an engineer. I doubt very much if he will ever run a train again but I think they could give him an opportunity to work as a conductor again in time. That's not to say that they will but maybe in time they will consider that alternative. I know of a couple of examples on freight railroads where something of this nature occurred and although the consequences were not nearly as serious as this one they gave the engineer a chance to return to work as a conductor provided he dropped all appeals in the case involved.
Noel Weaver

Amtrak engineer was new to Northeast corridor

CBS News has learned Engineer Brandon Bostian had only been working on the Northeast Corridor for fewer than three weeks. An NTSB spokesman tells says "it was two weeks, give or take a few days."

On Friday, NTSB Boardmember Robert Sumwalt described Bostian's experience as "a few weeks" a fact that went largely unnoticed due to the windshield news.

While investigators have not definitively ruled out mechanical failure, a focus of the investigation is on the train operator and his actions in the locomotive in the moments leading up to the derailment -- his relative lack of experience on the line and how that played in is also to be examined.

Link: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/amtrak-engi ... -corridor/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Here's a video of the area:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfVUnQ4kMYc&t=900" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
15:00 - start of curve usually taken at 65 mph(turns right)
16:38 - derailment area, usually taken at 55 mph (turns left)
17:13 - start of curve usually taken at 55 mph (turns right)

What we know:

1. The train accelerated out of that first curve up to ~106 mph (per public GPS data and NTSB)

• The windows were not penetrated by some foreign object

• Coming out of the first curve, the train accelerated as it normally would coming out of the next curve (per public GPS data of all 188 runs)

• The 1st and 3rd curve are both about 2-degrees of curvature (roughly calculated from map - first curve is compound)

• The two curves don't look drastically different during the day, but it was night during the accident. (See video, imagine less visibility)

I agree with Fishrrman: We appear to have a case of human error, which sucks for the passengers AND the engineer. The engineer is only human, and even the most attentive humans make mistakes. I'm kind of hoping that the NTSB finds some 'excuse' for his loss of attention, but I don't see anything being talked about that is credible.

Solutions?:
In terms of a second man in the cab, history shows this doesn't help in these cases. Intuitively, and from experience, the second man pays LESS attention than the operating engineer. To attempt to alleviate the second man being less attentive, NORAC requires that the second man 'call out' every signal. Unfortunately this rule doesn't seem to be followed. Other than road-foreman, I almost never see that happen.

There are numerous NTSB reports that indicate the inadequacy of a second man in the cab, which is part of the reason alerters are mandated. Even with alerters, it's been shown on (at least) two NTSB after-accident reports that the 'sleeping' crew continued to move the throttle.

This type of incident can really only be addressed by cab signal*, PTC or restriction-less track geometry. (*Contrary to a comment on the previous page, cab signal CAN enfore civil speed restrictions. This is done at numerous locations, including this exact curve west-bound.)

jackintosh11 wrote:

jtr1962 wrote:I believe the shortest NEC trains right now are the 5 car Keystones. I've never seen anything shorter.

I believe New Haven - Springfield is considered a part of the NEC and some if not most of the New Haven - Springfield Shuttle trains are a cab car and a coach plus a locomotive.
Noel Weaver

airman00 wrote:Already we saw this guy had only a one hour break between runs and his previous run was a bit stressful. And supposedly Amtrak has an unwritten rule of one and a half hour break between runs but they ignore that and it seems they prefer a quick as possible turn around to get back out again. Perhaps Amtrak is to blame for this incident IF they pushed this guy to his limits and he was so tired that he lost focus.

He reportedly was running nearly a half hour late arriving in Washington, DC, so if there is a minimum hour and a half between runs, it is based on scheduled times, not actual times. He may well have had that time, but running late southbound would eat into that.

188 was scheduled to depart at 7:10pm and arrive at NY at 10:34pm.
It actually departed at 7:16pm and departed Philadelphia on time at 9:10pm.

The scheduled regional arrivals in DC from NY were (working backwards) 6:45pm, 6:25pm and 5:15pm.
The 5:15pm was train 93 ... departing NY 12 minutes late at 2:14pm and arriving DC 35 minutes late at 5:50pm.
I am assuming this was his train since the next prior regional train was scheduled for a 4:18pm arrival.
It also fits the "half hour late" claim.

Was the engineer responsible for other work in the time between runs? 93 continued south - was this engineer responsible for getting 188 out of the yard and to the platform? Was there a run before 93? Or was three hours there, three hours back his work for the day?

I read that he had worked an Acela run into DC and turned back on 188.

Noel wrote above:
[[ Hear me out, it cost Amtrak a lot of money to train this individual first to be a conductor and later on to be an engineer. I doubt very much if he will ever run a train again but I think they could give him an opportunity to work as a conductor again in time. ]]

I hear you, Noel.

But I don't think he'll get back in any capacity.
There were eight deaths and many injuries.
There will be many lawsuits filed against Amtrak resulting in high payouts and much additional cost to the company.

In addition, the guy may be faced with both civil and criminal prosecution.

Remember Back Bay?
Did they get back?
(and no one died in that wreck)

Silverliner II wrote:

airman00 wrote:Already we saw this guy had only a one hour break between runs and his previous run was a bit stressful. And supposedly Amtrak has an unwritten rule of one and a half hour break between runs but they ignore that and it seems they prefer a quick as possible turn around to get back out again. Perhaps Amtrak is to blame for this incident IF they pushed this guy to his limits and he was so tired that he lost focus.

He reportedly was running nearly a half hour late arriving in Washington, DC, so if there is a minimum hour and a half between runs, it is based on scheduled times, not actual times. He may well have had that time, but running late southbound would eat into that.

So then how much time are engineers supposed to get between runs? No time at all? Because if that's the case then how are we preventing engineers from getting burned out?

mmi16 wrote:I read that he had worked an Acela run into DC and turned back on 188.

2165 arrived on time 6:48pm
2163 arrived on time 5:53pm
2121 arrived 26 min late 5:19pm

If it was 2121 he still had nearly two hours before the 7:10pm scheduled departure of 188 (unless there was yard work).