The engineer passed the FIXED Signals - which is what speed boards are. in the 21st Century they are reflectorized and ‘light up’ in the beam of the headlight and if you are only halfway attentive they are hard to miss. In fact, in urban areas it can be very difficult to discern illuminated wayside signals in the plethora of highway traffic lights and all the other light sources that exist in urban areas, Part of being QUALIFIED on any particular territory is knowing all the traps one can fall into.
Hundreds of similar operating conditions at various points on all railroads are safely operated over by hundreds of trains each day. A curve is not a ‘block condition’ - it is not a train
Signs are subject to vandalism and should not be the primary guide but coupled with PTC and proper training there should be at least one mechanism to maintain situation awareness.
I am sure it probably will not be needed in DuPont as the memorial markers will imprint the dangers of not reducing speed, but has there been any procedure changes that have been published since the incident?
If you have a TRULY QUALIFIED engineer even signs are not necessary. However, I have my doubts how may TRULY QUALIFIED engineers even exist anymore. A TRULY QUALIFIED engineer knows his territory like a blind man knows his living space and everything that is in it.
I thought I was over being incensed by that situation, but I come to find I am not.
Review the data, including that in the engineer’s transcript, regarding the time and nature of the ‘training’ given by Amtrak and WSDOT. Pay careful attention to the number of trips run under low-light conditions.
FULLY QUALIFIED by any meaningful railroader’s definition does not come anywhere remotely near the slackness and failure of that operation. I would say it’s a wonder they could ever run a train safely down that stretch, except… oh wait, they didn’t.
I fully agree with your assessment of the ‘training’ provided to the incident engineer and the rest that participated. They were not QUALIFIED on the route.
Or, to fill in, ‘vetting, training, supervision’ … and, I’ll bet, route qualification for much longer, and in much greater detail, than Amtrak and WSDOT ‘provided’.
Sadly Amtrak still eschews input or oversight from veterans of the operating department and chooses instead to continue the hit and miss trial and error tactics it has employed since inception.
What does this say about the supervisors and managers that directed the “Training” and “Qualifying”? I think they are a significant if not PRIMARY cause of this accident. THEY are directly responsible for assuring that the crew is qualified and they FAILED to see that the crew was provided with appropriate skills.
That almost goes beyond saying – which is fortunate, because even on a family-friendly forum it would be difficult to refrain from using appropriate words.
The thing I found particularly alarming was that Nosferatu Jr. did not seem as if he had even understood there was a lesson to be learned. HAVE the crews that will operate the ‘renewed’ service actually had revised and better training, and full qualification? I’d be tempted to say it’s more of the same-old, now depending on PTC to actually control the required deceleration at the end. And that is a glaring danger should PTC ‘glitch’ in any number of ways…
There is more than enough blame to go around for every entity that was involved. WSDOT did not make sufficient track time available to Amtrak for qualifications as they were reserving a large block of the day for track work that was still taking place at the time the qualifications were taking place. Additional WSDOT set a hard date for start of service without regard to the qualification process. Amtrak did not dispute any of the WSDOT timeline. Amtrak then provided a wish and grin ‘training experience’ for multiple people per trip.
In my bystander’s opinion, if an intermediate lower speed zone were in place an appropriate distance prior to the 35 mph curve, the accident could have been prevented, regardless of poor vetting and training.
You’re probably right. But the issue would then become whether the poor sap would miss the distant and home markers for the lower-speed zone too – they being part of the same long descending grade marked only by supposedly-reflective speedboards placed out of direct line of sight.
The most logical way to mark the slowdown would probably be with a permanent restricting aspect of some kind – perhaps the logical one being a fixed yellow searchlight or aspect. All the intermediate-zone does is put that aspect one block further up the long downgrade… and while it is useful, it’s really not that much more useful than what I recommended, which was a permanent yellow aspect warning ‘distant’ ahead of the fixed curve.
I do continue to be convinced that fixed color-light wayside signals instead of little reflective mystery boards would have prevented this accident had they been used properly. That would be even more enhanced if “proper” PTC had been installed in conjunction with the color lights, capable of dropping the distant aspect to red on unreduced overspeed and initiating penalty braking early enough to keep any part of the train off the curve. This would still be the ‘correct’ point of action for an intermediate-speed warning unless speed-controlling train control were provided. The advantage there would be – perhaps – that when the crew felt a targeted reduction they might ‘remember’ where they were on the route, and fall to controlling the movement appropriately.
But in amidst all the other wretchedness, they couldn’t even be bothered to turn on PTC at that one point, where it was most essential…