Below is the most powerful first person description of a serious railroad accident that I have heard. Throughout our previous discussions about this collision, I could eventually visualize what happened in detail, but still, a lot of detail was missing, including the exact moves of the engineer and conductor, the arrival of the Amtrak train, the timing, etc. That is all finally clarified by this interview. This was the classic switch position mistake that seems to have occurred many times throughout history.
It seems as though the conductor had made a lot of moves through various switches that night and had to keep track of how they were lined, and so, he simply forgot to re-line one of them. He makes no excuses for his mistake, but just finds it difficult to believe that he did what he did.
It is stunning how similar this accident was compared to the Robinson, NM head-on collision on the ATSF RY in 1956. In both cases, you have two crew members disagreeing and questioning each other about whether the switch is lined right. In this case, it was the engineer and the conductor, and in the Robinson wreck; it was the engineer and the fireman. And in both cases the disagreement was being debated right up to the moment of the collision. It was the collision that settled the question in both cases. In both cases, the person who had wrongly lined the switch could not explain why, other than just believing he had correctly lined it.
In the Cayce collision NTSB report, the conductor’s interview reveals a fairly long and detailed process of giving up his track authority. Apparently there was some confusion about the need to refer to the switche
There was not enough time for that in either the Cayce collision or the Robinson, NM collision in 1956 that I cited for comparison. In the Robinson disaster, the question of the switch position only emerged a couple minutes before the train arrived. The switch was correct, but the fireman on the ground had violated some rules in going up the switch and unlocking it prior to the meet.
The engineer may have thought that the fireman has mistakenly thrown the switch wrong as well, so he tried to convey his uncertainty by tooting the horn and eventually blinking the headlight. This raised doubt in the mind of the fireman, and at the last second, he decided the switch must be wrong, so he threw it. But it had been right and he threw it wrong in the face of the approaching passenger train.
At Cayce, the engineer laid out a compelling case as he explained to the conductor why he thought the switch had been left wrong by the conductor. But he only did this seconds before the Amtrak train came into sight around the curve. As I mentioned, I find it very strange that the engineer had not spoken up earlier when he claims to have noticed that the conductor had not restored the switch. At that point, they still had track authority so there was plenty of time to restore the switch for the mainline. Also, the engineer would have had to confirm the switch being right when they gave up track authority and verified the switch positions in that process.
Here is the interview of the freight engineer on the job that was struck by Amtrak due to the open mainline switch. In the interview of the conductor (above), the conductor describes being questioned by the engineer about the switch just as the Amtrak train was approaching, so it was too late to get to the switch to check its position.
In this conversation questioning the switch, the engineer reveals that his doubt about the switch being correctly lined goes back to when he failed to see the conductor throw the switch as would be expected. Since that was perhaps 30-60 minutes before the Amtrak train showed up, I wondered why the engineer did not confirm the switch position at that time when there would have been plenty of time to correct it if it was not lined for the mainline.
Here in the interview of the engineer, there is intense questioning about the engineer seeing the conductor’s moves which seemed to lack the throwing of the switch for the mainline as would have been required. The transcript is difficult to read, but it seems that the engineer did question the conductor about the switch earlier when it first saw the conductor apparently failing to line the switch for the mainline. But he did not go so far as to go and check it himself. It seems that he sort of dismissed the issue when the conductor reaffirmed that the switch was correctly lined. So the conductor went ahead and released his track authority.
However, later when they were sitting in the locomotive cab waiting for the crew van, the engineer had what he referred to as a “feeling” or an “intuition.” Apparently, he suddenly felt that the switch was wrong d