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 the FRA has recently modified US regulations to more broadly permit European crash-compliance standards on US train-sets newly built.
My friends very possibly may have been at the large widows in a vestibule area of their car, preparing to photograph the merger of the new By-pass line with the usual Point Defiance mainline at Nisqually Junction, which means they could easily have been thrown away from the train when the cars broke apart at the vestibule/shared truck point. If so the Talgo waiver may have been justified.
In addition this accident was about the most terrible anyone could imagine--taking a 30mph curve at 78mph--going down an embankment into a forested area and with part of the train ending up on a freeway--so no train-set could have emerged unscathed. But if they were in their seats then a very serious issue opens to understand why they (and one other unfortunate fellow) alone among the 80+ riders/staff perished. Both died of massive head trauma. I know that Jim Hamre, at least, was found on the ground outside the train. We also know that at least one coach was literally stripped of its roof by the impact.
The theory on the newly relaxed standards for European designed cars is that they will absorb the impact of a crash in the vestibule area. The traditional US standard expected the entire car would basically survive structurally, even if unrestrained passenger were thrown around within. (Seat belts on a train might help??).
I long felt US crash standards artificially constrained the ability of Amtrak and other carriers to acquire state of the art equipment at reasonable prices. But this may prove me not only wrong, but tragically so. I think about this virtually every day. Beware of your own certainties.
Moreover the last four Talgo sets delivered (the two for Oregon and the two never-used sets intended for Chicago-Milwaukee-Madison, Wisconsin service) do meet US standards, so Talgo clearly can do it with respect to traditional US crash compliance.
But at least five wavered train-sets remain active daily in the Cascades pool. Worse Amtrak is so deeply short of cars that in the short-term it would be virtually impossible to replace them. At a minimum it certainly looks wise to add the Wisconsin sets to the Cascades train-set pool. These would need some interior work to add Business Class seating and a better cafe car setting, but that is certainly doable. I do not want the Talgos withdrawn from service, but I do want to know what may need to be done if they did not perform in this accident as anticipated.
I believe the Avelia Liberty high-speed sets being built for the NEC fall under the new standards. This matter cries out to be closely followed. We may have made an horrific mistake and if so we need to act soon to prevent an even worse catastrophe on a packed NEC service traveling at 150 mph--not 78mph. For now I simply mourn two great friends who died far too soon.
Carl Fowler
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:
This is a joke.
https://www.kiro7.com/video?videoId=951256226&videoVersion=1.0
243129This is a joke. https://www.kiro7.com/video?videoId=951256226&videoVersion=1.0
Political Buck passing.
Never too old to have a happy childhood!
..
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.
Quote from some of the news coverage:
“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 to get down to 30 mph.
The warning indicator was addressing only the fact that he was exceeding the 79 mph speed limit by 3 mph. It had nothing to do with the fact that the engineer was going too fast to get down to 30 mph before reaching the curve.
Yet, the article clearly implies that the engineer’s unfamiliarity with the overspeed warning device was part of the engineer’s excuse for not slowing down for the curve. The NTSB is mixing several things that confuse the engineer missing warning signs with confusion about the speed warning and his unfamiliarity with the new locomotive. They are mixing these things together in order to brew up an excuse for the engineer, so they can concentrate their report on the political agenda of PTC being not yet installed and operational.
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 needed reserve could be met that way, or by allocating the back-up Amfleet set from southern California--or even Horizon fleet from the midwest. More cars will be available fairly soon when the new Siemans fleet is delivered for midwest and California service--thus freeing up Amfleet/Horizon, even ex-NJ Transit upgraded cars. Not ideal, nor as stylish, but safer until Washington and Oregon can somehow find the funds to order new cars. If the current sets are to stay in service they must be strengthened/modified in some way to reduce the chance of another Dupont on the countless curves along the Cascades route.
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.
Euclid 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.
Euclid !!! Perfect!!!
BaltACD 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.
Look at this !!!! I am in full agreement with BaltACD!!! Will wonders never cease!
+1
Poor vetting, poor supervision, poor training. RX for disaster. There will be more.
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.No design is perfect against an accident as severe as DuPont. But we need to think very carefully about what happened there and particularly consider its implications for future train-sets.Are the new Avelia Liberty cars being built for 150mph + speeds on the NEC more likely to survive this sort of crash? They meet our newly revised standards. Should there be some reassessment of these in light of DuPont? Or is there no relevance to the Talgo 6 design and the new US standard? I don’t know the answer to any of this, but think the questions are worth posing.Of course traditional US cars can be totally compromised in worse case crashes. This befell at least one Amfleet coach that got wrapped around a steel and concrete catenary mast in the Philadelphia NEC derailment. In the Silver Star South Carolina accident an Amfleet II lounge car was bent to a lazy “L” shape. But in that cornfield meet disaster the deaths were all in the Amtrak locomotive cab.We have traditionally had the highest crash survival car standards in the world. Of course technology evolves, as do safety appliances like PTC.The Washington tragedy was unambiguously the result of human errors. But we need to honestly assess what role the train’s cars played in the results that befell its riders.Better training, PTC, better supervision, etc will all probably preclude another derailment at the DuPont curve, but the question of equipment integrity is a very fair issue to discuss and to try within reason to mitigate.
Sound familiar?
https://www.king5.com/article/news/ntsb-poor-training-oversight-led-to-deadly-2017-amtrak-crash-in-dupont/281-75e3159a-0762-4dbd-8ee3-c3627ea676cd
https://www.progressiverailroading.com/federal_legislation_regulation/news/NTSB-Inadequate-planning-training-led-to-fatal-Amtrak-derailment--57630?email=r.m.ellsworth@att.net&utm_medium=email&utm_source=prdailynews&utm_campaign=prdailynews5/22/2019
Euclid I am not ignoring your message but I have not been able to sign in for the last 10 days and now I cannot access your message.
Carl Fowler 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.
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.
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 or down or sideways in relation to its neighboring train car. The TurboTrain also had a linkage permitting it to tilt, but apart from the give of stiff rubber pads in that drawbar, the entire train had to tilt as a unit.
The Talgo weight bearer allows such sway between train cars. The drawbar connection needs a degree of sideways articulation to allow for this sway. The Talgo also has massive dampers (shock absorbers) between the two train cars to limit this sway in both the vertical and horizontal directions -- the TurboTrain apparently didn't need these according to the photos and drawings I have seen.
That the single-axle truck came loose and caused fatalities is indeed in retrospect a weakness of the unorthodox Talgo design. A two-axle truck in a conventional passenger train, it appears, is not prevented from separating from the car body either, but a conventional truck doesn't have those two tall posts connecting the axle journals to the top of the train car for the pendulum-tilt suspension, posts that may have acted like battering rams in the accident.
That the drawbar separated, however, is something that Talgo needs to explain to the authorities. I can understand coupler knuckles parting, but a semi-permanent drawbar connection can be as stout as it needs to be. Maybe the additional degrees of articulation allowed by this drawbar made thed design of the drawbar more difficult, but this should not be an excuse.
If GM "killed the electric car", what am I doing standing next to an EV-1, a half a block from the WSOR tracks?
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