What We Know About Amtrak 501

Earlier today, we saw the latest in a series of crashes that have plagued Amtrak and other US passenger rail providers over the last few years. This is, first and foremost, a human tragedy; but it is also an urgent concern of public policy. While trains–and all public transit–are on a population level much safer than driving, there is no need to accept any casualties at all, ever. While others–primarily the NTSB–will provide a full analysis in the weeks and years ahead, this is my attempt to reckon with what we know about this incident as of the same evening. I had intended this to be a series of bullet points but WordPress doesn’t like the formatting, so I’ve bolded every topic heading. 

Let’s keep in mind that the victims of this tragedy should be in our minds; I haven’t seen a casualty count since the morning, but we know there are fatalities and serious injuries. That shouldn’t have happened, and in addition to wishing their families comfort, this post is inspired by a sense that we–myself as a transportation professional and those who read this blog–should do all we can to prevent such things from happening.

Amtrak 501 was operating over–was, in fact, and somewhat remarkably, the very first revenue train over– the Point Defiance Bypass, a state/federal-funded project that moves passenger trains from a mudslide-prone, curvy waterfront route around Tacoma to a more direct, faster route.

 

Source: WSDOT

While the tracks for the bypass have been in service, they have not carried passenger trains along their whole length until now. Trains have been running to test the line for months, but this was the first one to carry passengers.

As befits its purpose, the Point Defiance Bypass is mostly straight, easy 79-mph running, but the area where the train derailed is much trickier. Toward the southern end of the bypass, not far from rejoining the freight main at Nisqually Junction, the tracks flow into an S-curve with a bridge over I-5 in the middle.

 

Looking south, in the direction of train travel.

Going into the curve southbound, the speed limit drops from the standard track speed of 79 mph to 30 mph, as confirmed by an Amtrak employee timetable I’ve been sent. 

According to one report, there should have been an indicator sign two miles before the speed restriction indicating the drop in speed; certainly, there was a sign indicating the 30 mph restriction immediately before the curve.

The train was probably going too fast. Amtrak’s train tracking system doesn’t report train speed or location completely continuously (at least not publicly) but in this case it appears to have pinged the train immediately before the crash, reporting a speed of 81.1 mph at a position just 1400 feet east of the crash site. The system isn’t 100% reliable, so don’t worry about the report that the train was going two mph above the speed limit (which wouldn’t have made a difference in any case).  The same Seattle Times report quoted a motorist who said he was driving in the 60 mph range and the train was going faster. And the positioning of the crashed train–the lead locomotive taking a nearly straight route out of the curve, as if it didn’t follow the tracks at all–indicates a speeding train whose inertia carried it (or rather, part of it) forward. Remember, the train should have been going 30 mph going into that curve. There is no way for a passenger train to shed 50 mph in the space of 1400 feet.

If the reporting system data and eyewitness reports are at all accurate, this is pretty clearly a case of a train exceeding the speed it should have been operating at. Overspeed (as it is technically known) is, however, more a descriptor than an explanation; beyond that I strongly discourage speculation. There are too many causes to count: operator error; signal failure; equipment problems (the lead locomotive was a brand-new Siemens Charger); track problems (remember, this is new, or at least recently refreshed, infrastructure); or any number of other possibilities.

Though I discourage speculation about root causes, it’s impossible not to note the scary parallels between this crash and two other recent overspeed crashes, Amtrak 188 at Frankford Junction, Philadelphia in 2015 and Metro-North at Spuyten Duyvil in the Bronx in 2013.

 

Diagram of the Amtrak 188 crash at Frankford Junction. Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/here-everything-we-know-about-amtrak-188-train-wreck-in-philadelphia-2015-5

 

Metro-North crash at Spuyten Duyvil. Source: https://twitter.com/NTSB/status/407329136735027200/photo/1

Curve in 2013 Spuyten Duyvil crash rated for 30 mph. https://t.co/jN4CqmHhll
Today's curve almost identical. Per reports, both trains were traveling ±79 mph. pic.twitter.com/nw3ybgJ6cj

— Ari Ofsevit (@ofsevit) December 18, 2017

Amtrak 188 entered a 50 mph curve at 106 mph; in a situation eerily similar to today’s the Metro-North train entered a 30 mph curve at 82 mph. We still don’t really know the root cause of the Frankford Junction crash, though most theories have centered around the engineer (who is suffering from amnesia from the accident) losing attention somehow, without his recollections it’s impossible to know for sure. At Spuyten Duyvil the engineer suffered from sleep apnea and was apparently asleep as the train went around the curve (the same issue has come up in several other, more minor commuter rail incidents recently, including at Hoboken and Atlantic Terminal). Whatever the cause, overspeed incidents are all too common on American railroads.

Discussions about these kinds of things always come back to Positive Train Control. Originally mandated by Congress after the 2008 Chatsworth crash—not an overspeed incident, for what it’s worth–PTC implementation was an unfunded mandate, has suffered extreme resistance from the railroad industry, and has been painfully slow. As at Frankford Junction and Spuyten Duyvil, PTC was not in operation on the Point Defiance Bypass today; as far as I can tell, it is intended for operational status later this year (as indeed it was at Frankford Junction…ouch). Yes, barring some kind of drastic equipment failure, PTC likely would have stopped this crash. But it’s worth noting that it’s not the only technology available to stop a speeding train headed into a slow zone; various forms of Automatic Train Stop have been able to do so for almost 100 years. So while the increasing series of crashes is absolutely making a cumulative case for cracking down on the rail industry’s PTC slowness, we should keep in mind that failures like this implicate not only the PTC mandate, but the entire safety culture of American railroading.

Let’s talk about safety culture. Jason Laughlin of the Philadelphia Inquirer just published a piece yesterday (literally not kidding) building off of the NTSB’s scathing assessment of Amtrak’s “safety culture,” stemming from yet another fatal crash, this one at Chester, PA in 2016. Let’s just take a moment to appreciate that the two maintenance-of-way workers killed in the crash and the train engineer involved all tested positive for drugs, and yet that was not found to be a necessary contributing factor to the crash. Similar assessments of commuter railroads have been, while perhaps not as bad, not encouraging either. American railroading has a lot of pathologies–a reactionary culture; toxic labor-management relations; an inability to accept innovation or new ideas–but few have the potential to affect riders as directly as the dysfunctional attitude that it sometimes seems everyone from the top down takes toward safety. It’s a problem that pervades both management and labor, and no one should escape the recriminations, when they come, unscathed. Alex Forrest has a good thread about the cultural contrasts between American and Japanese attitudes toward rail safety; but let’s just say the challenge of 21st century American railroading will be to change a culture where the idea that a train will go on the ground every so often is acceptable rather than unimaginable.

The train’s equipment–a new Siemens Charger locomotive and articulated, lightweight Talgo coaches–is fairly unusual by US standards, but there’s no indication it played any role in the crash. Here, you can see the Charger sitting on the freeway south of the bridge, the 12 Talgo coaches in various geometric arrangements across the crash site, and the trailing P42 (presumably included as insurance for the new locomotive) still sitting on the tracks. 

pic.twitter.com/X5yfK0GEim

— Andrew Byler (@DAndrewByler) December 18, 2017

Don’t freak out. Train crashes get a lot of attention because they’re unusual, visually spectacular, good media content, and a grand American tradition going back to the 19th century. That doesn’t mean they’re actually common. You’re still a lot safer on the train than in a car. I’m obviously mad at American railroad safety culture–and you should be too–but that shouldn’t get in the way of data-oriented reality, even in moments where it’s tempting. Because ultimately, this is all about getting our casualties from mobility down to precisely zero–and we have a lot more work to do on the car side than the transit side.  

Featured Image source: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/photos-from-amtrak-train-derailment-near-olympia/

A New Sleeper Train in the Rockies?

Featured image source. 

Prompted in part by experiences like this, I’ve thought a lot about whether Amtrak’s long-distance operations are at all viable. They’re unprofitable, slow, and infrequent, and seemingly constantly under threat–but also generally the most politically popular part of the Amtrak system, since rural elected officials love seeing trains in their districts.

In thinking about the long-distance trains, I often come back to this excellent Sic Transit Philadelphia post. The core of Michael’s theory is this:

I have a developing theory of sleeper trains, which is that they are essentially a point-to-point service. A sleeper passenger who is willing to pay a fare that is going to pay for most, or all, of her costs, wants a train that is leaving in the evening and arriving in the morning. Perhaps a short ride in daylight can cover more another market or two with the same departure, but the basic form is evening-morning. It requires two trainsets to operate the entire service.

The luxury of such a service is that timing can be somewhat loose; trains just need to arrive by the beginning of the business day. From a cost-savings perspective, a one-overnight trip could mean that passengers can eat before and after their time on the train, eliminating the need for an expensive dining car. Michael discusses several potential routes for such a service in his post, and it’s been an occasional topic of discussion on Twitter as well.

This topic came back to me earlier this week when I read Jim Wrinn’s pessimistic take on the future of the former Denver & Rio Grande Western main line through the Rocky Mountains. Apparently, this line, once dominated by coal traffic, is down to a couple of trains per day in each direction, plus Amtrak’s California Zephyr, the successor to D&RGW’s grand, long-lived (D&RGW kept operating it privately until 1983) flagship train. That’s not a lot of traffic to keep up a 570-mile line (including a 6.2 mile tunnel) in some of the most spectacular–and most brutal, for weather and maintenance purposes–scenery in the country.

System map of the D&RGW in 1965, featuring the Moffat Tunnel line. Source.

The coal traffic that once sustained the Moffat line is probably mostly dead for good. But, as Wrinn suggests in his piece, what if the former D&RGW could become one of the US’ rare passenger-primary routes? An unlikely proposition given the expense of maintaining it, surely, but the line does have a strong passenger heritage, and links two growing cities with extensive, recently built out transit networks that connect well to their intercity train terminals. And it’s just about the right length to trial the one-overnight model that Michael proposes above.

Today’s California Zephyr is essentially a day train, with a mildly useful but slow schedule westbound across the Rockies, and an equally slow but less useful one (3:30 AM departure from SLC!) eastbound.

A 15-hour trip wouldn’t work to run a one-overnight trip with two trainsets, but it wasn’t always that slow. The 1952 Official Guide (indicate Denver & Rio Grande Western on the menu at left) has westbound train 17 at 13:40 from Denver to Salt Lake, leaving at 8:40 AM and arriving at 10:20. Eastbound #18 left SLC at a somewhat more civilized 5:40 AM and arrived in Denver at 7:00 PM sharp, for a time of 13:20. The Zephyr was a true day train in both directions, complemented by sleeper service at night.

And I think it might be time to bring that kind of service pattern back. With much less freight interference than in the line’s glory days and modern equipment (this line might work very nicely for tilting trains), it might be possible to get run times down into the 12-hour range. Even if that’s not possible and some train sets have to lay over, one day trip and one night trip in each direction–plus the Zephyr, whenever Amtrak feels like running it–between Denver and SLC might work nicely. The day trip would appeal to tourists wanting to see the spectacular scenery, while a barebones, no-meals sleeper operation could appeal to budget travelers who don’t want to make the stressful drive over the Rockies or don’t want to travel with a car. There’s also the possibility of restoring Ski Train service to resorts along the route, which current owner Union Pacific has been open to but Amtrak has been its usual obstreperous self about.

I don’t know if three passenger trains per day plus scattered freight service would be enough to justify the massive maintenance expense of keeping the Moffat Line open. I do know that the metro areas at both ends of the route are among the country’s biggest transit success stories, and have been highly creative in getting there. And I suspect that a day/night schedule on trains dedicated to SLC-Denver service could work. Hopefully someone will give it a try.

That Time Boston Could Have Had a North-South Rail Link for $8 Million

As part of my research project, I’ve been doing some looking into Boston’s North-South Rail Link concept–the idea of a tunnel linking, finally, North Station and South Station. NSRL is a complicated project whose merits are certainly up for debate (though I tend towards thinking it’s a good idea), but that doesn’t appear to be on the horizon anytime soon. But did you know that there was a point at which Boston could have had the tunnel built at minimal cost to taxpayers?

A March 8th, 1910 headline in the Boston Globe blares :

The gist of the accompanying article was that Timothy E. Byrnes, Vice President of the New York, New Haven, and Hartford Railroad, had conveyed to the state’s legislative committee on metropolitan affairs that the New Haven and the Boston & Maine–then united under the ownership of J.P. Morgan protege Charles Mellen–would be perfectly willing to pay most of the costs of a tunnel between Boston’s two stub-end stations, if the city would let them. The catch? They wanted the city to create a “boulevard” between the two stations, presumably cutting a broad swath through downtown Boston to enable cheap cut-and-cover tunneling.  The railroads estimated the costs to the city at $10 million–approximately $240 million today–of which they were offering to cover one-fifth, plus the costs of the tunnel itself, and of electrification of the Boston suburban rail network. Byrnes claimed the tunnel–and accompanying electrification–could be finished within three years, hauling both passengers and freight between northern and southern New England.

Surely, $8 million was a lot of money in 1910. But with the railroads offering to cover 2/3 of the cost of a tunnel, how did a project that would have proved so advantageous to the city that the idea is still being brought up a century later die?

Just four days after Byrnes–who had been on his way out of the hearing chamber at the end of the day when asked to speak–dropped his bombshell on the committee, the city responded. The Globe headline on March 12th read:

Babson was the city’s Corporation Counsel, who made sure to tell the committee that “under present conditions the tunnel would not be worth to the city anything like an outlay of $8,000,000” and that “the city should not own the tunnel because it does not own the railroads at each end.” A legislator suggested that the railroads might lease the tunnel from the city, paying 5.5-6% interest and with ownership reverting to the city after 40 years, but neither Babson nor the railroads were amenable to that suggestion.

The tunnel idea did not die immediately–according to one article I have found, it was still kicking around two years later, as part of contentious negotiations between Mellen and the Massachusetts legislature over the fact that his control of both the B&M and the NYNH&H gave him a near-monopoly on rail traffic in New England. The idea of joint government-railroad control of the tunnel, based on a lease with relatively steep interest, had resurfaced, and government investment in the tunnel was on the table in return for Massachusetts allowing Mellen to exercise full control of the B&M (which the legislature had previously intervened to stop). But the Mellen monopoly was, by 1912, in its last days; besieged by legislative action, lawsuits, and public pressure, the New Haven would soon divest itself of the B&M, though not before 21 of its directors (though not Mellen) were indicted for conspiracy to monopoly. I haven’t delved deep enough to know exactly when the tunnel idea last saw the light, but it seems to have died a quiet death.

From a public policy perspective, it’s hard to look back at this episode and resist the impulse to punch a wall. The short-sightedness of the public officials who could have allowed the tunnel to be built–and to high standards, with four tracks and electrification of the Boston suburban network!–is remarkable. But 1910-12 was a very different time in America, a time when railroads were very much still an immediate enemy in public life and a chief target of progressive reformers. And indeed, the 1910 tunnel proposal was very much a product of monopoly–it was integral to Mellen’s vision of a unified NYNH&H and B&M (which, according to the 1912 article, would have been re-branded as “New England Lines”), and the public benefits, while substantial, were entirely secondary. And as quick as we are to condemn brutal transportation-oriented urban renewal in Boston and other cities, can we really look back and say that the idea of clearing a boulevard between North and South Stations was moral?

Land clearance for a later transportation conduit through downtown Boston. http://www.cyburbia.org/gallery/data/6518/00w.jpg

Though we know that constructing the tunnel would have had horrible outcomes for the residents in its way, and it might have strengthened the Mellen monopoly, it’s hard to feel any other way than that Boston’s objection to the project was short-sighted. A full century later, the proposal to build a similar project is still percolating, and it’s hard not to wonder–if there is still an argument to be made for a tunnel, now that the region has sprawled and developed away from the rail-oriented suburban mini-cores that predominated then, how different might the suburban development of the Boston region have looked if city officials had been more willing to work with the railroads 105 years ago?