This is scary. It’s the Metra line to Joliet (old Rock Island). Note that a signal maintainer is alread on site. The track is owned by Metra, a government agency.
I can’t make the link hot.
And that in a nutshell is why mandated quiet-zone crossings are a dumb idea.
If the maintainer was on the scene - which the truck next to the signal bungalow would tend to indicate, the train SHOULD have had some form a crossing protection malfunction order and SHOULD not have been operating at track speed.
Did the maintainer radio the train and indicate that the protection was operating properly?
I believe I have heard of METRA having trouble protecting crossings in the past. I don’t have the incidents at my fingertips.
I would opine that it would depend on why the maintainer was there. Might have been routine maintenance, so no special orders.
If the maintainer was there for regular maintenance, then I would opine that he was the cause of the situation.
I am not sure of the test period for signal maintainers to test each crossing, somehow 30 days sticks in my mind.
It has been my experience that signal maintainers don’t always report to the Train Dispatcher when they come on the property to effect repairs or to perform tests. The lack of communication CAN result in a train showing up that the maintainer didn’t count on.
That thought did cross my mind…
Didn’t a similar incident end in a crossing collision in Utah last year?
I seem to recall a Chicago area incident 8-10 years ago where the maintainer wanted a ‘track speed test’ and a vehicle was struck when the protection did not operate as intended. As I recall 4 to 6 deaths was the result.
The article states the maintainer arrived a few minutes earlier for an unrelated reason. That he immediately started investigating the failure and placed additional protections in place.
I saw my neighbor, a signal maintainer, out in a crossing signal bungalow today as we went by. Some of the things they need to do require permission from the dispatcher, some don’t.
Jeff
Read in another forum that the malfunction was caused by a short in a switch position hardware that caused the gate malfunction.
I saw a link to a different news story where they said the same thing, a problem with a short linked to a switch caused it. Thinking out loud, but usually I would expect a problem like that to actuate the crossing signals. I’m wondering if the “fix” to the short may be the actual cause for them not to activate. I believe something like that has caused problems, in block signals as well as crossing signals, before.
Jeff
From the dash cam video, it looks like he was driving a ford explorer police interceptor?
Gave him some more ground clearance, if that was the case. Able to jump that curb pretty easy.
I noted how easily the car went over the median… the curb would have steered my car right into the train!
Video was on CBS tv this morning. May result in a delayed investigation by FRA ?
Except for the number of fatalities, that sounds a crossing crash in Chicago that killed Katie Lund. Signal maintainers had spent a day working on the crossing, then left in the evening. Later that evening, they returned to conduct a final test with an Amtrak train. They did not restrict the train speed or flag and hold traffic at the crossing in case the test should fail. The test did fail, the signals did not activate, and the train struck Katie Lund’s vehicle at 80 mph. There should be a lot of coverage on Google, but all I find at the top of the search is this deceitful, little gem blaming Katie Lund for negligence in failing to yield to the train. No mention of the gross negligence of the maintainers testing their work with no protection should the test fail. Brilliant.
Katie is one of the ‘poster children’ for the plaintiff’s-attorney sites that specialize in things like grade-crossing accident cases. There is plenty of mention of gross negligence there.
As with malpractice … while there’s a chronic problem with frivolous or manipulative claims, there are also genuine hair-raising cases of incompetence causing pain and death. As you point out, it’s important not to judge one way or the other without assessing the facts first.
In this current Metra ‘incident’, I think the story mentions that the signal maintainer was there working on the railroad signals, by which I understood the block signals or PTC equipment, and not the crossing signals. Which raised an immediate question of whether the PTC equipment might be tied into variable crossing activation in some way that might silently cause crossing-signal activation to fail as late as observed here. (I’d like to think ‘of course not’, but after the idiocy observed in S-4200, I no longer put implicit trust in the people doing the design and whatever passes for systems analysis and testing)
In watching the video, I noted that the gates did activate at the last moment - possibly when the train hit the island circuit.
A switch or relay failure might have caused the approach circuit to malfunction - ie, not activate the lights and gates. First of all, I’m not a maintainer, second, I have no idea which switch or relay had the reported short, so at this juncture, it’s virtually impossible to determine what should have happened in that case.
Some may opine that the maintainer realized at the last moment that there was a problem and activated the protection. I believe this equipment has logging, so that may be detectable.
As the locomotive passes, the maintainer can be seen coming out of the shelter and donning his hardhat. He goes in and out of the shelter several more times during the remainder of the video.
Perhaps more significant - the gates did not go back up after the train cleared the crossing. That might indicate that the gates were manually activated, or be a further indication of the failure that occurred.
The cop’s luck continued as he was fortunate that his vehicle did not deflect off the curb back into the road; yes, he did have the extra clearance afforded by the Explorer, but first the vehicle’s tires had to overcome the curb.
Interesting how the crossing protection remained active throughout the length of the video.
99.8% of the time when a maintainer is called to a crossing it is because ‘someone’ has reported some kind of malfunction with the crossing. I am certain METRA will have a record of why the maintainer was at the crossing. Many times the maintainer is called when the protection activates with no train in sight To my knowledge crossing protection and PTC have not been connected to each other.
Others will have to comment on other installations. However the Denver “A”, “B” & “G” lines do have that set up . We know how well that works ? NOT ! ! !
Just ask MC.