by Semaphore Sam
Any further info about this event? Causes, results of investigations, anything? Especially about the signals aspect...thanks, Sam
Railroad Forums
Moderator: GOLDEN-ARM
JayBee wrote:The Union Pacific has reached their own conclusions as to the cause, and has sent out a briefing to employees. And that is that the Eastbound crew fell asleep, the briefing was a reminder to their crews about rest management. The only help on the horizon is Positive Train Control (PTC). There was no serious other contributing factor. The railroad doesn't want to make changes in how the trains are operated (more tightly scheduled), and the unions and the majority of their members don't want any changes that will reduce their income(fewer trips per half).
One of the problems with speculations on a railroad board is that with accidents like this, the railfans know the cause and so do the professional railroaders. With no injured parties (fatal or otherwise) except for the railroad employees involved, the professional employees feel the fans are dumping on them by publicly posting that the deceased crew fell asleep, they tend to get very defensive and at least temporarily go silent about anything depriving the railfans of inside information, some even will leave the board permanently. The NTSB is generally seen as a disinterested party, and so when they say the crew feel asleep, the professional railroader's don't take it as a personal attack. I think most railroaders rationalize the situation with the attitude that it happened to the other guy but it won't happen to me, statistically they are probably right, but most crewmen who have worked for a number of years will have had an incident where they don't remember passing a grade crossing or other point even though they know right where they are now.
Mbta fan wrote:The ntsb will publish the fianl report when they feel they got all the facts right. It takes time to get everything from train speeds to what the crews rest periods were.With the exception of the speed of the train and the crews rest reports, the final report is only going to paint the fact that the problem lies with the Eastbound train. You're not going to find out anything from the data recorders that were in the front locomotives as those were destroyed to the point of being essentially unusable ( which isn't surprising given the fire ). In fact I believe that is listed in the NTSB's initial report, which greatly limits just how much investigating they can do and might play a role in the final outcome as you can only speculate on what the crew of that particular train was doing.