The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) will release its full report on the tragic Dupont, WA Talgo wreck next week–May 21
Two of the three passengers who perished at Dupont were best friends of mine, Jim Hamre (the brother I never had) and Zach Wilhoite. It was inconceivable that I, living in Vermont, should know two of the three victims of a crash in Washington state so well. But I lived there 1981-1987 and retained many friends–but alas fewer now!
Indeed I met Jim Hamre in 1981 while we were mutually leafleting to save and improve the Seattle-Portland Amtrak Corridor. He devoted much of the next 30 years to accomplishing that as a founder and officer of both the Washington Association of Rail Passengers and NARP. And then to die on the first trip over the new line? The force of destiny is too cruel!
Although Zach was much younger, he too had been a devoted advocate for the project. Both were transport professionals too. Jim had retired from a long career in the Washington DOT as an engineer and software manager on the highway side of the agency, while Zach was a computer/scheduling specialist for Washington’s Pierce Transit bus service. But fundamentally they both understood balanced public transportation and passionately backed the rail as well as the highway mode. They had shown their commitment to state of the art rail when they paid their own way to attend the great rail trade show, Innotrans, in Berlin, Germany earlier in 2017.
I will be particularly interested if the report indicates anything about how they died and where they were on the train when it so hideously derailed. This concern is not maudlin.
The train-set assigned to Amtrak 501 on December 18, 2017 was a wavered non-US crash compliant Talgo unit. This means it had been exempted (by a proper review process at the time) from the highly demanding crash safety rules normally applying to US-built equipment. This is significant because th
Yeah, Talgo is crap in my opinion. Here is hoping that the old geazer that is Governor of Wisconsin now is not going to go to them for a trainset for Milwaukee to Chicago just because they have an open plant in Milwaukee. They only have that open plant in Milwaukee because Wisconsin paid them so much in tax abatements, they did not earn that space competitively like other Wisconsin railcar firms. Their PR spokesperson is pretty slimey as well. They can afford to keep the Milwaukee Plant open until 2023 due to winning the contract to rebuild Bombardier subway cars for California. I would use Bombardier and pay the higher cost as I do not trust Talgo to do a quality job on that contract…time will tell though.
I’d have thought people would have been all over this.
Board meeting started at 1:00 pm Eastern to determine what will be in the report. It was streamed live, and the archived version of that Webcast should be available by the end of the day. Staff presentations available in PDF. Start here:
Okay, I was able to open the second link. In my opinion, the NTSB’s conclusion as to cause could not be more wrong. If the cause was a lack of PTC, then shut down Amtrak until PTC is fully implemented. I knew they would not blame the engineer for knowingly taking the risk of running blind. They say that the engieer was a helpless victim of not having PTC, so he had to gamble with the lives of his passengers. This is creepy. It is a totally political finding to blame the negligence of the engineer on a lack of PTC that would have overridden him. What the public needs is some kind of protective device that will save us from this kind of report.
You know that in the case of Frankfort Curve - Amtrak, I felt too much blame was heaped on the engineer, with the distraction of rocks being thrown at nearby trains, if not his, and the possibility of old PRR speed control ATC being removed in advance of new PTC affecting the situation.
Here, the engineer should not have diverted his attention from the view ahead to focus on the alarm. Either he should have delegated addressing the alarm problem to the conductor, or brought the train to a stop to address the problem.
What do you do when driving a car if an alarm goes off? The same thinking applies, even if steering is done by flanged wheels and steel rails.
He did not run into the curve 50 mph over the 30 mph limit because he was diverting attention to the alarm. He was lost before he got to the curve. I think the evidence shows that he realized or stongly suspected he was lost way before he arrived at the curve. Yet he was in denial of the gravity of the situation and chose to gamble with the lives of his passengers in the hope that somehow everything would turn out okay. He was a cheerleader for the cerimonial nature of this first run on the new line, and he did not want to tarnish that event by slowing down the train and then having to explain that he did that because he was not sure where he was.
With or without PTC, the engineer had a responsiblity to safely run the train. For the NTSB to conclude that the engineer was a helpless victim because he did not have PTC to protect him from his bad judgement is just pathetic.
The NTSB making this lame excuse is part of the culture here. I would not trust that culture enough to ride their trains.
“The engineer, while experienced, had little training in the new Siemens Charger locomotive. He missed a warning sign two miles before the curve indicating a speed restriction would be coming up. A half-mile before the curve he missed another speed limit sign because he was distracted by a safety device that had gone off inside the cab.
He was also not aware of the device, used to warn the engineer the train was traveling too fast, because of limited training. The device was designed to warn the engineer with a noise and warning lights on two screens, that he was going too fast.
In this case, the train was traveling 82 miles per hour, which is over the speed limit for the upgraded line known as the Pt. Defiance Bypass - a shortcut to speed train times between Tacoma and Portland.
NTSB staff said because the engineer was focused on what was happening inside the cab, he missed the last sign and another signal.”
This is a smoke screen. It makes it sound like the engineer’s lack of familiarity about the speed warning device caused him to fail to slow down for the curve.
But there were two speed issues occurring at one time. First the engineer was exceeding the overall maximum line speed limit of 79 mph by going 82 mph. Second, he was too close to the 30 mph speed restriction for the curve t
The NTSB Report has appeared and sadly seems to confirm some of my worst concerns. So many sources for this catastrophe. A few observations. I had actually discussed the 30mph curve with my friend Jim Hamre, who died in the crash. Jim had retired from the Washington DOT several years prior and was a highly experienced highway engineer. He explained that the Stimulus Funding that paid for the new route was not sufficient to cover what WashDOT projected would have been what he said could have reached a $60,000,000 total cost to realign not only the curve, but to also rebuild the two bridges over I 5 and to reconfigure the entire approach alignment from the north. Hideous irony? A cost that somehow should have been embraced?
Of course error by the engineer, lack of adequate pre-trip training, failure to have a train-master or other Amtrak supervisor in the cab, grossly excess speed, etc caused the crash. Fate is complex.
But we must not skirt around the catastrophic failure of the Talgo train-set. The wheel-set that essentially ripped asunder the car my friends Jim and Zach were riding in was part of an articulation between cars. It is horrifying to think that this flying truck could essentially de-roof and destroy the side-wall of a entire coach, thus sending the unfortunate riders in its path airborne out of the car to their traumatic fate.
I have long loved the comfort, sophistication, ride and style of the Talgo train-sets, but if the NTSB is right the time is now to retire the three remaining crash-standard wavered sets, and to add the never-used, stored, but fully US compliant Wisconsin sets to the two compliant sets in the northwest equipment pool, modified as needed to add Business Class seating and a nicer cafe.
This would give the Cascades Corridor four usable Talgo train-sets, against a need for five to cover current schedules with a reserve for servicing. Already one Seattle-Vancouver trip is run using a Superliner set
The incident was caused by a UNQUALIFIED engineer being at the controls without QUALIFIED SUPERVISION on the first run on a new route. Inept management by Amtrak complicit with lack of proper training time and enviornment created by WSDOT.
Of course weight alone is not the perfect cure to safe design. But the traditional US crash standard, which required the car body to survive essentially 1,000,000 pounds pressure from impact over the draw bar was remarkably strong. By contrast the European standard assumed the vestibule area would compress and the body of the car survive.
In the DuPont tragedy the key to the degree of destruction suffered by the cars seems to have been their separation over the articulated trucks and the failure of their non traditional couplings, which were apparently at least partially some sort of cables.
One feature of US coupling standards is the use of tight lock couplers on mainline passenger equipment intended to operate at higher speeds. These are much less likely to break in a derailment. Train 501 might have better stayed in line if it had not broken apart as it went down the embankment.
A look at the aerial photos at DuPont shows that the train suffered multiple separations. The engine and the front cars went down the embankment in the direction of travel and to the right of the bridges. The fatalities took place in car 7504, which was demolished on that side as it descended. But other cars jumped the railing of the bridge and ended up on the highway to the left and at least one upside down. If the train had remained coupled there is at least a chance cars would not have stacked on each other, nor ended up upside down.
Of course bodies flying around inside would still have sustained severe injuries. But things would have been far more survivable if the detached wheel set had not effectively de-roofed car 7504 and if the side of the car body had remained intact. This does not generally happen to US standard cars.
We can take limited comfort from how many riders did survive the horrible progress of this accident. But we shouldn’t simply dismiss the NTSB’s warnings. And I say this again as someone who long argued US standards were too severe.
The dismissive, four-letter word used to describe the Talgo design in a much earlier post is certainly not helpful, but your post offers constructive remarks regarding what should be expected from an unorthodox train design.
The respect to your question about “cables”, I had downloaded an article from a scholarly engineering journal explaining the unorthodox coupling between Talgo cars, but I am working right now from memory guided by a photo supplied by the Talgo company.
There are three forms of connection. The first is those “cables” you mention that are actually slender steel rods. This pair of rods forms what I call a “trapeze” by which the B end of one Talgo car lacking a pair of wheels is suspended from the A end of its neighboring Talgo car having a pair of wheels. The Talgo company calls this connection the “weight bearer” because it transfer the weight of the B end to the A end of the adjoining car and on to the single-axle truck. This weight bearer can be a slender steel rod because it is only expected to carry a load in tension.
The second connection is the sets of horizontal rods, one set connecting each wheel journal to each of the two adjoining train cars, which provides the steering system to direct each pair of wheels to follow a curve in the track. The third connection is a proper drawbar conveying the buff or draft (push or pull) forces – this part of the semi-permanent connection substitutes for the tightlock couplers on a conventional passenger train.
The guided-axle United Aircraft TurboTrain had a stout ball joint that kept one train car from swaying up