Metro
Since a Metro-North Railroad train derailed in the Bronx on Dec. 1, killing four people and injuring more than 70, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority has not had to look far for safety remedies that might have prevented the crash.
Recently ordered improvements, delivered in response to the derailment, have been borrowed from Metro-North's sister agency, the Long Island Rail Road, and at times from the Metro-North system itself.
Changes significant enough to have thwarted the crash, according to rail experts, were simple enough to have been completed within days. Others are so straightforward that some of the authority's board members assumed they had been in place for years. While the authority and federal investigators have cautioned that a full accounting of the derailment is not yet complete, many transit officials have arrived at a troubling conclusion since the crash: The authority could have - and in many cases should have - installed a series of protections long before the train's operator apparently became dazed at the controls early that Sunday morning, racing into a sharp curve at nearly three times the allowable speed.
For a railroad long considered the gold standard for the region's commuter systems - in 2011 it became the first American railroad to win a coveted international award for design excellence - the focus of much of the rail industry has in recent days turned to why Metro-North lacked safety features that had been in place on some other railroads for years.
'My belief was always that safety was first,' said a board member, Ira Greenberg.
Now, he said, 'you start to question that.'
Last week, the Federal Railroad Administration announced a review of Metro-North's operations and 'safety culture,' the first time the agency has conducted such an investigation of a passenger railroad. On Monday, board members are expected to discuss the derailment when they meet for the authority's first public meeting since the crash.
So far, the authority has suggested that second-guessing would accomplish little.
'What could have happened, what should have happened, it hasn't entered my mind,' Thomas F. Prendergast, the authority's chairman, said. 'We're focused on trying to ascertain exactly what happened.' In a letter to the railroad administration a few days after the Dec. 1 crash, Mr. Prendergast acknowledged the 'hazards revealed' by the derailment. Last week, responding in large part to an emergency order issued by the railroad administration, the authority said it had upgraded its signal system near the crash site, just north of the Spuyten Duyvil station, to warn operators of the reduced speed limit in the curve and brake the train automatically if it were not traveling at or below 30 miles per hour.
The existing cab signal network, which communicates information from the rails to an operator's console, has long included the ability to enforce speed limits if modified accordingly. But until the crash, the system had been used only to warn of other trains or red signals ahead, with a goal of avoiding collisions.
By contrast, a system to enforce speed limits on certain sections of track has been in place at several points on the Long Island Rail Road for years. New Jersey Transit said its cab signaling system also enforced speed restrictions at a series of curves. And last year, the authority said that Metro-North's own Port Jervis line would add a new signal system to enforce speed restrictions.
Officials expect that the Metro-North's signaling system at four other potentially dangerous curves and five bridge sites will be similarly modified by next year.
Asked why broader changes to Metro-North's signal system were not made sooner - particularly at well-known curves like the one at Spuyten Duyvil - Marjorie Anders, a spokeswoman for the authority, said it was the job responsibility of train operators to 'know all the physical characteristics, including the speed limits' in all areas where they were qualified to work.
For more than 30 years, she said, 'that system worked fine,' with no accident-related passenger fatalities since Metro-North was created in 1983. The recent changes were 'a result of the intense introspection currently underway at Metro-North,' she said.
Some board members said they were more startled than reassured by the speed with which the authority was able to complete recent signal work. It was done simultaneously with track and power repairs after the derailment and was available on all trains operating through the curve at Spuyten Duyvil by last week.
'The fact that some of the stuff was done in the rebuilding of track that occurred over a couple of days, it does lead you to believe that it could have been done earlier,' said William Henderson, the executive director of the Permanent Citizens Advisory Committee to the transportation authority.
The authority also said it would install so-called alerter systems in operator's cabs lacking them. One such system - which can detect operator inactivity, sound an alarm and apply brakes if the operator is unresponsive - was present in the train that derailed.
But it was in the locomotive pushing the train, not in the front cab, where the operator, William Rockefeller, was stationed. Because the train was in a 'push-pull' configuration, propelled from behind on southbound trips and tugged from the front on northbound ones, the train effectively employed an 'alerter system' for only half its runs - a fact that surprised some on the authority's board.
'If it's valuable northbound,' asked a board member, Andrew Albert, 'isn't it valuable southbound?'
The railroad was already reeling this year after a succession of mishaps: a train collision on the New Haven line in May, which injured scores of passengers; the death less than two weeks later of a track foreman in West Haven, Conn., who was struck after a trainee rail controller opened a section of track without proper clearance; the derailment of a freight train in Spuyten Duyvil in July; and a lengthy service disruption in September after the failure of a Consolidated Edison feeder cable on the New Haven line.
Charles G. Moerdler, a board member, suggested that the railroad's emphasis on on-time performance had often sidelined discussions of safety measures.
Board members and the public, he said, 'press Metro-North, press Long Island Rail Road on 'you've got to meet your schedules.' That pressure becomes such that people do not do these things that would slow it down.'
At a National Transportation Safety Board hearing last month, Howard R. Permut, Metro-North's president, said that safety was 'one of the critical factors' in evaluating managers for possible promotions. While on-time performance is 'mentioned,' he said, 'it doesn't have the same importance.'
The safety board, which is also leading the investigation into this month's derailment, has said that a high-cost system known as positive train control would probably have prevented the recent crash. Its features include a capacity to slow trains around sharp curves, like the one in Spuyten Duyvil. A version of the system has been in place on Amtrak since 2000.
Positive train control must be installed by 2015, under a federal mandate, but the authority has suggested it will not meet the deadline, calling the technology 'untested and unproven' for commuter railroads as large and complex as Metro-North and the Long Island Rail Road.
Mr. Greenberg, the board member, said the prospect of positive train control in recent years had diverted attention from other possible safety enhancements.
'I think it may have slowed down the process, actually,' he said. 'Why put in a system on top of a system that does virtually the same thing, when you can wait for the better one?'
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