Some of you may have heard or read about the runaway LIRR locomotive last week that happened in New York City. It happened in a neighborhood near where my aunt used to live. I was in disbelief to read about the events and the carnage it caused. To this day, there’s still one person on the critical list. The locomotive was left unattended, drifted away, struck 3 cars and 2 railroad maintenance before stopping on it’s own. This week I read that the NTSB and the LIRR have come to the same results of their separate investigations. They found fault in the crew’s handling of the engine and found the engine to have faulty air brakes, eventhough the engine had just come out of a 90 day FRA scheduled maintenance. I think there’s a problem, when a locomotive which just come out of scheduled maintenance, has the air brakes bleed off on you in short amount of time, to then drift away on you. The Long Island Railroad handles litrally, millions of people in a week (if not in a day). To think that this is the type of servicing that this equipment gets, is scary. The only lucky thing about this incident is, it happened on a little used freight spur and that more people didn’t get hurt by it. The cars that got clobblered happened on streets that crossed this spur line. The New York State Department of Transportation deemed that, that line see such infrequent traffic that it would be too costly to install any type of warning devices. When a train does come through this area, residents say that crew members get down to stop traffic, usually with red flags and flares. My thoughts and prayers go out to the victims and their families. Also, my thoughts and prayers go out the crew members, who’s jobs are now on the line and as I know, the LIRR will most definetly hang them out on a hook for the NTSB and the FRA to feed on. I don’t condone what they did. They should have known better than to leave any piece of rolling equipment unattended without making sure that, that equipment isn’t going to roll. If there’s one thin
Glen,
FRA will fine the engineer if they find his locomotive without a hand brake applied, and the unit or units not isloated.
In a MU, all units in the consist must have hand brakes applied, and all units must be isloated.
According to the FRA inspecter that visits us often, unattended means no one is physically on board, but does not mean that person must be the engineer.
In other words, my engineer can hop off and water the weeds, as long as I or our helper is on the locomotive.
Agree with you on the funny part, if the locomotive just came out of a 92 day inspection, you would think the shop forces would have done a leak down test on the locomotive brakes.
Ed