DISTRACTED RAILROADING

[tree68]

There are plenty of perfectly legitimate distractions in the cab of a locomotive.  Most are brief - glancing at the speedometer or other gauges - but that second or two could be enough to be a factor in an incident.

Might the engineer have been distracted by the entire rock-throwing factor?  Sure!  I'm sure any of us would be.  It's not hard to imagine hearing on the AM/FM in your car a traffic report that rocks were being thrown at cars in an area you are about to enter.  Would you be watching your speed, or watching for rock throwers?  (Rhetorical question - don't answer it.)

So we have another potential piece of the puzzle.  Once we see the final report, we'll hopefully know exactly how that piece fits in.

[PNWRMNM]

Euclid,

You should have the common decency to hold your speculation until after the NTSB says whatever they will say.

You should also remember that while the NTSB is supposed to be a fact finding agency, they are as political as anyone else in that town, so there is no particular reason to accept what they conclude as true unless it is consistent with the evidence, but they also control the evidence!

Mac

[daveklepper]

Nonsense.   Hearing aboiut rocks bgeing thrown is very different than texting.  If rocks are being thrown, one might be aimed at you!

And their is still that unexplained hole in the windshield./

[Euclid]

These thoughts occur to me as we wait for the final rollout of the NTSB’s conclusions about the cause of the wreck of Amtrak 188, scheduled for today.

Yesterday, they reported that the cause of the wreck was the engineer being distracted by radio conversations regarding the rock throwing incident nearby.  What I am waiting for today is news indicating whether the wreck is blamed on the engineer for being distracted—or—blamed on distraction.  There is certainly a difference.

Distraction can be caused by distracting behaviour, so it is easy to outlaw that behaviour such as texting while driving.  But distraction can also be caused by simply thinking about something that becomes compelling and engaging. 

In railroading, there is plenty of legitimate and legal activity that can cause distraction in addition to basic “day dreaming.”  It has always been my understanding that no rules infraction is forgiven on the basis that the employee was distracted at the time.    

In operating a motor vehicle, a driver who becomes distracted is negligent, and if the distraction causes a crash, it is the fault of the distracted driver, even if the driver was engaged in no typically distracting behaviour.

Here is a legal article about it: 

http://www.all-about-car-accidents.com/resources/auto-accident/after-car-accident/what-cognitive-distraction

From the article:

"Once again, cognitive distraction is negligence, plain and simple. If a plaintiff’s lawyer can prove that the defendant in a car accident case was doing something to cause his/her attention and focus to be taken off of the road, the plaintiff is likely to win."

So it follows that if there is no way to show an activity on the part of the driver that would have caused distraction, there is no way to prove that the driver was distracted.  But if distracting activity can be shown, the driver is likely to be found at fault for being distracted. 

In the case of Amtrak 188, the NTSB is clearly making the case that the engineer was engaged in distracting activity by listening to radio conversations about a troubling event.  Yet, so far, they stop short of actually saying that the engineer is to blame for causing the wreck.  So far, it sounds like they are saying that the distraction caused the wreck, thus leaving the impression that the engineer cannot be faulted for succumbing to distraction, because the distraction was caused by legitimate railroad business.

I could be entirely wrong, and we might soon find out, but it sounds to me that the NTSB is making an excuse for the engineer by making him a victim of distraction.  Yet in so doing, they are actually making the legal case that the engineer was negligent by citing evidence of him being distracted. 

It seems odd that the NTSB would jump to that speculative conclusion since the engineer says he is suffering from a loss of memory during the timeframe that includes the radio transmissions.  A loss of memory could well be entirely unrelated to hearing the radio transmissions.  So if they don’t know what caused the loss of memory, or what effect it may have had in the cause of the crash, it seems really strange for the NTSB to set aside the claim of memory loss and speculate that distraction was the key to the cause. 

Logically, I must interpret the NTSB to be saying, in effect, that they do not believe the engineer’s claim of memory loss; and instead, they conclude that he was distracted by the radio transmissions.  Legally, it would therefore follow that the engineer’s negligence caused the crash.  I am waiting for the NTSB to provide clarity on that final point about the responsibility for the distraction, which they say caused the wreck.