How To Prevent America's Next Train Crash

Long-overdue rail upgrades could prevent the next big train catastrophe. So why are the railroads so reluctant to make them?

By Dan Baum Posted 01.17.2013 at 9:00 am 14 Comments

A Big One When a Norfolk Southern train hauling chlorine through Graniteville, South Carolina, derailed in 2005, toxic gas poured into the town. AP Photo/Aiken County (S.C.) Sheriff's Department

The evening of January 5, 2005, was dry and cool in Graniteville, South Carolina. At 6:10, a 12-car Norfolk Southern freight train pulled up to the Avondale Mills textile plant, and Jim Thornton, a conductor with 18 years’ experience, climbed down from the locomotive to open a switch and let the train roll onto a siding. It was getting close to the hour by which, according to law, the crew had to quit for the day and rest. After the workers had shut down the train, Thornton called a taxi to take him, the engineer, and the brakeman to a nearby motel. It never occurred to him that, for the first time in his life, he’d failed to check the position of a switch that he’d opened. All he thought, as the crew piled into the taxi was, “Lord, mission accomplished.”

Seven hours later, a second Norfolk Southern freight train—two locomotives, 25 loaded cars, and 17 empties—approached Graniteville at 49 miles an hour. The engineer expected to pass through at full speed. Instead, the open switch shot him onto the siding. He saw the parked train and tried to stop, but it was hopeless. Both locomotives and the first 16 cars of his train derailed; the engineer was killed. Three of the cars contained chlorine, a common industrial chemical; one of them sheared open.

A dense white cloud of chlorine gas billowed through Graniteville. At 2:40 in the morning, police rousted 5,400 people from their beds and evacuated them. Eight more died; 72 sickened. The disaster helped push the Avondale Mills plant, which had been making cloth in Graniteville for 161 years, out of business. Four thousand people, some of them fifth-generation Avondale employees, lost their jobs. Seven years after the wreck, people in Graniteville are still sick.

* * *

Trains carry 40 percent of America’s freight as well as 650 million passengers a year, and in general, their safety record is good and getting better. Most of the 2,000 accidents a year are minor. But when trains collide or derail, the results can be spectacularly ugly. Last June, two Union Pacific trains somehow ended up on the same Oklahoma track and collided head-on with such force that the locomotives almost fused. Three crewmembers died. Three weeks later, 17 cars of a 98-car Norfolk Southern train went off the rails in Columbus, Ohio, busting open three cars of denatured alcohol and igniting a fire that forced the evacuation of about 100 people. A CSX coal train jumped the track in Ellicott City, Maryland, in August; six of its 21 cars tumbled into a parking lot, killing two young women bystanders. In November, a Union Pacific train plowed into a Veterans Day parade float in Midland, Texas, killing four. Later that month, a CSX train derailed on a bridge near Philadelphia International Airport, tearing open a tanker filled with 25,000 gallons of vinyl chloride and sending 71 people to the hospital.

Although the railroad keeps our 21st-century economy running, it's essentially a 19th-century technology.Most worrisome are the 75,000 carloads of breathable poisons that trundle around the nation’s tracks every year at speeds of up to 50 miles an hour. The two most common are chlorine—the Graniteville chemical—and anhydrous ammonia, both of which can kill in particularly grisly ways if inhaled. Graniteville was the country’s worst rail accident involving breathable toxins, but there have been two others in the first decade of the 21st century: Minot, North Dakota, in 2002 (anhydrous ammonia; one dead), and Macdona, Texas, in 2004 (chlorine; three dead). At Minot, the problem was poorly inspected rails and inadequate tank-car construction, but at Macdona, the cause was as simple as at Graniteville: The engineer failed to notice a slow-down signal and blew past.
Could happen to anybody.

As bad as these accidents were, they could someday be remembered the way we recall the 1993 World Trade Center bombing—as a harbinger of worse to come. Imagine a railcar full of chlorine bursting on the CSX tracks less than a mile away from a big public event on the Capitol Mall in Washington, D.C.—an inauguration, say, or a concert. The resulting cloud could kill 100,000 people. Al Qaeda might do it, but it’s more likely that a $55,000-a-year engineer, in the 10th hour of his shift, would simply nod off at the controls. Human factors cause more than a third of all rail accidents.

Although the railroad keeps our 21st-century economy running, it’s essentially a 19th-century technology. Rail operators have known for decades that technological fixes could prevent rail disasters caused by the kind of human errors committed at Macdona and Graniteville, but they have been dragging their feet because those fixes are expensive and complicated. Congress is now making them get it done. But the railroads could also cheaply and humanely achieve big safety leaps simply by improving the working conditions of engineers—something they’re even less enthusiastic about doing.

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14 Comments

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suggestivesimon

01/17/13 at 12:28 pm

Great article. Thank you.

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Robot

01/17/13 at 12:51 pm

'I think I can' not!
'I think I can' not!
I not.

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gizmowiz

01/17/13 at 2:02 pm

It's amazing that there are any accidents these days with computers and monitors and central facilities. Just a really stupid industry if they have a single accident which there is no need for that if everything automated and tied in to a central core. Stupid people living in the 1900's still.

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johnt007871

01/17/13 at 3:10 pm

Air conditioned sheds? Sounds like an Electrical engineer's solution. Surely there is a passive solution that's more reliable and efficient than a window unit.

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laurenra7

01/17/13 at 4:07 pm

$10 billion + $850 million a year to maybe prevent 7 deaths and 22 injuries a year sounds like a system designed by a Congressional committee. How much would it have cost to install an image sensor and loud alarm that blares "YOU MISSED A RED LIGHT!" in each engine instead of the uber-complicated positive train control? The safest transportation system in the world, commercial aviation, doesn't have a positive control system. Why couldn't a similar system of transponders installed on trains suffice?

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johnt007871

01/17/13 at 4:23 pm

@laurenra7

I believe because trains change length. Car's arent even the same length, so 2 trains 20 cars long won't be a consistant length. So if it transpsonder picked up a train a mile away how does it know how much time it has to stop? I've thought about it before because we have trains that tend to stop in the middle of town and depending on how long they are they will block intersections. The trains don't care, they just stop at the red light. The fun part is getting the front to know where the back is. Does every car need a sensor? Seems expensive. Designate an oversized standard for car size? (cars average 50 ft, so use 65ft x 20 cars = train length) Not very exact, but cheap and relies on correct information. Have a sensor beside the track to ping the front/back of a train and keep that info in the "train cloud?" Maybe, since they are investing so much in these light posts they could probably do double duty.

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Jellybelly

01/17/13 at 4:51 pm

What is needed are smart robotic trains. A new global re-design that will automate all these error prone jobs.
Look what we're doing with the self-driving car and the train is already self-driving!

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laurenra7

01/17/13 at 6:58 pm

johnt007871, it was purely speculative, but what I was thinking about was a relatively inexpensive image sensor mounted at the front of the train (sometimes the engine is at the back), designed to watch for train signal lights that are red. It would measure speed, calculate for estimated mass (or number of train cars) and sound a loud alarm if the train is approaching a red light too fast to stop. It won't prevent all possible rail accidents, but it would minimize the risk of some. The point being that railroad travel in the U.S. is already remarkably safe and these complicated and expensive positive train control systems are unwarranted, given that not even the incredibly safe commercial aviation industry has anything like it.

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Railronin

01/17/13 at 7:21 pm

As an engineer with 27years experience there is a lot in this article that has been addressed like cell phones are not allowed on your person at all.and the hours of service has been changed to prevent over work and sleep deprivation. On the northeast corridor we have cab signals that if you ran a signal the train would stop automatically so things are not as bad as they make it out to be.now that being said there is no excuse for crews not doing there job to the best of their ability like leavening switches open .that was a crew and dispature failure ,

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tmarti69

01/18/13 at 2:44 am

If the railroads had applied targeted implementation, they would be facing much less expensive options. One would be commuter rail were fatalities are most probable. Putting laser scanning devises and cameras with train, car, and pedestrian recognition software, on commuter trains first. This is already done in self driving cars. Collision avoidance is in their future anyway, swallow a little pride call the car companies, or create a DARPA like x-prize for grad student to fix this for them. They could just throw money away until they implement the most antiquated solution. Only to have it replaced several times. They should also consider the rail as a possible network cable sending messages to sound boxes that tap out messages to other trains that pick them up by lasers reflecting on the rail. The rail is everyplace and can even communicate with a train in a tunnel. Either way we will do this again until we get it right, or we could plan how to do it cost effectively.

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nkfro

01/18/13 at 1:31 pm

gimowitz, please re-read the article. The issue raised by the article is that the MAJORITY of the nations rail system is NOT effectively, adequately and accurately monitored.
Any system can be "computer-monitored" using one sensor. The question is then the value of the monitoring. Is one sensor enough? If not, then how many and where are they needed? Systems are rarely static. Most expand. Does the monitoring expand as well?

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466lex

01/19/13 at 7:47 pm

Remarkably, the writer of this column either failed to locate, or located but chose not to use, this significant report of the Federal Railroad Administration:

“Report to Congress: Positive Train Control Implementation Status, Issues, and Impacts”
August 2012

Notably, from the Executive Summary:

“…this effort is hampered by the novel nature of the issues. PTC implementation, on the scale required by the RSIA, has never been attempted anywhere in the world.”

and

“However, since FRA approved the PTCIPs, both freight and passenger railroads have encountered significant technical and programmatic issues that make accomplishment of these plans questionable. Given the current state of development and availability of the required hardware and software, along with deployment considerations, most railroads will likely not be able to complete full RSIA-required implementation of PTC by December 31, 2015. Partial deployment of PTC can likely be achieved; however, the extent of which is dependent upon successful resolution of known technical and programmatic issues and any new emergent issues.”

Read the entire report here:

www.fra.dot.gov/eLib/Details/L03718

Further from the Executive Summary:

“Although the initial PTC Implementation Plans (PTCIP) submitted by the applicable
railroads to the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) for approval stated they would
complete implementation by the 2015 deadline, all of the plans were based on the assumption that there would be no technical or programmatic issues in the design, development, integration, deployment, and testing of the PTC systems they adopted. However, since FRA approved the PTCIPs, both freight and passenger railroads have encountered significant technical and programmatic issues that make accomplishment of these plans questionable. Given the current state of development and availability of the required hardware and software, along with deployment considerations, most railroads will likely not be able to complete full RSIA-required implementation of PTC by December 31, 2015. Partial deployment of PTC can likely be achieved; however, the extent of which is dependent upon successful resolution of known technical and programmatic issues and any new emergent issues.

“The technical obstacles that have been identified to date fall into seven different categories:
• Communications Spectrum Availability
• Radio Availability
• Design Specification Availability
• Back Office Server and Dispatch System Availability
• Track Database Verification
• Installation Engineering
• Reliability and Availability

“The programmatic obstacles fall into two categories:
• Budgeting and Contracting
• Stakeholder Availability

“To date, railroads have raised and expended more than $1.5 billion of private capital to try and resolve these issues. The Federal Government has distributed $50 million through the Railroad Safety Technology Grant Program. Solutions to these issues have either not been identified or cannot be implemented by the current December 31, 2015, deadline.”

Read the entire report and weep. The complexity of this endeavor, with the incumbent “vital” (essentially absolutely failsafe) technological requirements if even the marginal economic benefits are to be realized, virtually assures the failure of the project.

If the (worthy) objective of saving lives were to be optimized by Congressional diktat to expend $15 billion on railroad infrastructure, then surely PTC would rank well below isolation of railroad right-of-way to avoid collisions of trains with trespassers and motor vehicles.

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Minecraftgenious

01/25/13 at 11:49 am

I really think they should have automated trains

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quasi44

01/27/13 at 1:03 pm

@Railronin; Out west it's different. We have some seriously remote places out here that crews have to get to in order to have a safe place to change out, and it happens sometimes that they just cannot get there. Road conditions happen.