Does anyone know where you can find out the findings of derailment investigation?
current reports (last few years) can be found at http://www.ntsb.gov/, although it may take some looking around. Only the formal reports are posted (look under railroads, then publications). Historical reports, which are fascinating and sometimes very instructive, can be found at http://dotlibrary.specialcollection.net/
Be aware that minor problems don’t make it to the formal report stage, and aren’t published on the web, so far as I know. And also keep in mind that the more major ones can take a while to show up; the NTSB is very very thorough and painstaking, and it can be a year or more before a report is released.
Thank you
some will be reported at the FRA site instead of the NTSB site so if you don’t find the one you are looking for at one site, check the other.
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If you are looking for something about the Metrolink/UP collision, it will probably be awhile.
Here is the NTSB’s railroad investigation report page.
http://www.ntsb.gov/publictn/r_acc.htm
You won’t even get the preliminaries for 6-8 months…thoroughness takes time.
Most of the reports on the publications page at NTSB indicate a 12-15 month time delay between incident and report. I highly recommend reading some of the reports to understand what mud says about thoroughness. They are remarkably informative, in some cases, and are designed to in most cases become a part of the “lessons learned” body of knowledge.
My personal favorite was an investigation into a school bus collision detailed in this report. Although the school bus driver insisted that she had stopped at the grade crossing and “looked both ways” before proceeding, video from an onboard camera on the school bus showed that not only didn’t she stop on that day at that grade crossing, tapes also showed that she had repeatedly gone over that crossing without stopping (8 of 11 times).
I don’t think this particular incident was the prime mover for companies to install loco cameras, but it certainly pointed out the benefits of having some video available.