News Wire: Safety board takes aim at Talgo train set in Cascades crash investigation

[Brian Schmidt]

WASHINGTON — The conclusion of an investigation into a 2017 Amtrak Cascades derailment has touched off a debate over the safety of non-conventional trainsets. The National Transportation Safety Board concluded Tuesday that the Talgo equipment...

http://trn.trains.com/news/news-wire/2019/05/22-safety-board-takes-aim-at-talgo-train-set-in-cascades-crash-investigation

[Carl Fowler]

Now the NTSB report confirms 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 could 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.

[Carl Fowler]

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.

[MidlandMike]

I agree that those exemped Talgo cars showed why they should lose their exemption, and should be returned to the builder.

[CMStPnP]

.....And this comes as no surprise to me because the brand is "Talgo". 

[charlie hebdo]

Considering how little fast passenger train service there is in the US compared to other countries (numbers and density) and how many accidents we have, perhaps the more important questions are in the realm of avoidance:RoW design, Joe's VTS, signaling, etc.

[GERALD L MCFARLANE JR]

There's no logical reason on this planet why our cars need to meet an 800,000 lb crush standard(not a million pounds)...an accident is an accident, doesn't matter how, where or why it happened, it's still an accident and deaths happen.  People are overly concerned with keeping people from getting killed when if they survive in a vegetative or incapicitated state they are a far greater drain on both family and society as a whole.  Callus, yes, it is, but it's also reality, the only thing that caused the deaths was the separation of the wheelset(s) from the frame, if that had not happened we wouldn't even be talking about this, and that was most likely caused because the forces of the derailment far exceeded anything the Series 6(or for that matter any othe car) is designed to withstand, you can't plan for the worst case scenario, it would make everything prohibitively expensive.

[BaltACD]

GERALD L MCFARLANE JR

There's no logical reason on this planet why our cars need to meet an 800,000 lb crush standard(not a million pounds)...an accident is an accident, doesn't matter how, where or why it happened, it's still an accident and deaths happen.  People are overly concerned with keeping people from getting killed when if they survive in a vegetative or incapicitated state they are a far greater drain on both family and society as a whole.  Callus, yes, it is, but it's also reality, the only thing that caused the deaths was the separation of the wheelset(s) from the frame, if that had not happened we wouldn't even be talking about this, and that was most likely caused because the forces of the derailment far exceeded anything the Series 6(or for that matter any othe car) is designed to withstand, you can't plan for the worst case scenario, it would make everything prohibitively expensive.

Let's bring back wooden cars with pintsch gas lighting and coal stoves for heating  - it's cheaper and nobody needs to live through an accident. [/sarcasm]

[7j43k]

Perhaps just shoot the wounded:

 

Quick.  

Painless (for the wounded).  

And the entire course of treatment/rehabilitation is less than a dollar.  

And 100% effective.

 

 

Ed

[Overmod]

7j43k

And the entire course of treatment/rehabilitation is less than a dollar.

I believe on Chinese HSR they follow tradition and bill the cost of the treatment supplies to the surviving next of kin.

[charlie hebdo]

"The first high-speed rail system began operations in Japan in 1964, and is known as the Shinkansen, or “bullet train.” Today, Japan has a network of nine high speed rail lines serving 22 of its major cities, stretching across its three main islands, with three more lines in development. It is the busiest high-speed rail service in the world, carrying more than 420,000 passengers on a typical weekday. Its trains travel up to 320 km/h (200 mph), and the railway boasts that, in over 50 years of operation, there have been no passenger fatalities or injuries due to accidents."  [from Environmental and Energy Study Institute fact sheet]