Cascades 501 Wreck 18 December 17

lstone19 wrote:The problem with using signals for civil speed enforcement is they take information away. Use Approach to protect a 30mph curve and now you can cause "expectation bias". Although Approach means approach next signal prepared to stop, if Approach is the best you ever see, you start thinking "that signal is always Approach. The next one will be Clear just as it always is" and keep the speed up. Until the day it's not and there's a train stopped one foot beyond it. Oops.

Thank you for your excellent and very well detailed response.

farecard wrote:http://www.kiro7.com/news/photos-massiv ... /666679669

Yikes. That looks worse than I thought.

Looks can be deceiving. The Gennie that catapulted over the ravine in last year's Vermonter wreck had one side torn off by tree damage, and it looked real ugly on the pics. But it ended up being mostly superficial damage, so that unit is being repaired. But since the VT derailment was caused by fluke rockslide and had no casualties, there was no insurance impound and all damaged equipment was able to go straight to the shop. This stuff is going to be sitting in a yard covered under tarp for years while the lawyers poke around.

Whether they choose to repair the Charger is the question. WSDOT has drained all its options on the Charger contract, so actually is sitting pretty comfortable on power cushion right this moment whereas they're not with the Talgo fleet if multiple cars from this set are totaled. There's also still 36 unexercised state options on the Charger contract in Caltrans & IDOT hands with no deadline on exercising before 2019 if WSDOT wants a laundered unit to produce a new replacement. Warranty should recoup a lot of the money sunk into the wreck so total cost of bumming an all-new unit out of the Cali/IL options won't total to the same as a straight-up new unit cost.


The Talgos...yikes, they're already short and running Superliners on part of the schedules because there's zero margin for shop rotations with this fleet. I don't see any options for recouping back to full strength that don't involve outright purchase of the stored trainsets originally intended for Wisconsin.

Or let go of the Talgo experiment and just go Siemens low level like everyone else.

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-ne ... mbers-bay/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;


Just to throw this out there, Amtrak had a train derail in Chambers Bay just 6 months ago. The engineer was suspended for excessive speed and not following signals.

frequentflyer wrote:Or let go of the Talgo experiment and just go Siemens low level like everyone else.

To be honest, it looks like the Talgos handled this crash well enough, and that they absorbed and redistributed the majority of the crash energy. It's difficult to claim that a conventional 85' car or a bilevel would have performed better and had fewer fatalities or injuries in this kind of wreck.

http://www.oregonlive.com/pacific-north ... _that.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Drew Mitchem was sitting on the left side of the Amtrak car talking with a friend about how fast the train was going. Cars on the freeway looked as if they were standing still.

Then the Centralia man saw through the windows that the rail cars ahead of him were "going everywhere."

In a flash, he saw asphalt coming at him as his rail car careened off the overpass above Interstate 5 near Olympia.

"This is it," he thought. He closed his eyes.
...
As he braced himself for impact, Mitchem said he heard the crunching and screeching of metal, and screaming. He tumbled through the air.

"Then I remember waking up on the freeway," he recalled Tuesday night from his hospital bed. His Nike sneakers and Seahawks hat had been blown off in the process

As he regained consciousness, he was stunned. "I was like, 'What, I'm alive?'" Mitchem said.
...

Is Drew (or anyone else) a member of this forum?

I don't want anyone to think that I'm saying that Amtrak's training is inadequate. My point is that as a train crew that is employed by another RR but having to qualify on Amtrak rails might not get the same type of treatment as say a full time employee for Amtrak. I don't know how it would be vice versa that if you were an Engineer for Amtrak but was qualifying on another RR's property, how the training would be? Maybe someone could shed some light on this? Was this Amtrak Engineer trained to operate on this line by Amtrak or by Washington State or by BNSF? Also, while we may not want to speak of it much, the subject of "loss of situational awareness" must also remain on the table as we already know was the case with train 188. I would even be willing to say that operating the first train on the first day of a new line on board a new type of locomotive would raise the level of the chances that one could lose situational awareness rather quickly, and as mentioned, with two more people in the cab. With two more people up front, I would highly doubt that any form of sleep apnea or medical condition could have played a role in this, but you never know. Back to what I was saying above, each RR has their own set of rules and protocols in regards to training and qualifying, and they also decide how the training will take place when dealing with an outside employee who will be operating trains on their property. From my knowledge, the LIRR requires the guys on NYAR to qualify exactly the same way that LIRR employees must do, but I can tell you by experience, that I was not trained the same as their employees were.

F-line to Dudley via Park wrote:
Whether they choose to repair the Charger is the question. WSDOT has drained all its options on the Charger contract, so actually is sitting pretty comfortable on power cushion right this moment whereas they're not with the Talgo fleet if multiple cars from this set are totaled. There's also still 36 unexercised state options on the Charger contract in Caltrans & IDOT hands with no deadline on exercising before 2019 if WSDOT wants a laundered unit to produce a new replacement. Warranty should recoup a lot of the money sunk into the wreck so total cost of bumming an all-new unit out of the Cali/IL options won't total to the same as a straight-up new unit cost.


.

I can't see how this can be covered by warranty, unless a fault on the charger caused the crash, which is looking unlikely.

Mark777, how much training does it take to read and follow speed signs on a railroad? A seasoned engineer whether he was new on this track or not should be able to at least follow clearly marked speed indicators. If an engineer is easily distracted then they should find a different career. Too many people's lives are in danger on a railroad. I never bought into the excuse of "lost situational awareness". If the engineer is unsure of speed on the track then slow down. Radio the conductor or the dispatcher, find your milepost.

David Benton wrote:How hard would it be for Amtrak to setup a GPS based warning system for speed restrictions? The Engineer and conductor carries the tablet or whatever with the system on it for the route , so no need to equip the actual trains.

GPS nominal accuracy is only +/- 15 meters - not enough to differentiate between tracks on a multi-track ROW. There are plenty of different differential GPS implementations that can get down to 10cm accuracy, but those all require fixed land stations.

In addition, GPS receivers need clear lines-of-sight to at least four satellites simultaneously. That's not always easy in heavily built-up areas, mountain terrain, or places with deep forest cover. It's even harder inside a railway carriage.

David Benton wrote:

F-line to Dudley via Park wrote:
Whether they choose to repair the Charger is the question. WSDOT has drained all its options on the Charger contract, so actually is sitting pretty comfortable on power cushion right this moment whereas they're not with the Talgo fleet if multiple cars from this set are totaled. There's also still 36 unexercised state options on the Charger contract in Caltrans & IDOT hands with no deadline on exercising before 2019 if WSDOT wants a laundered unit to produce a new replacement. Warranty should recoup a lot of the money sunk into the wreck so total cost of bumming an all-new unit out of the Cali/IL options won't total to the same as a straight-up new unit cost.


.

I can't see how this can be covered by warranty, unless a fault on the charger caused the crash, which is looking unlikely.

Warranty costs are typically factored into the cost of the product. If there are unused warranty dollars, which would be significant on an $11M locomotive, they could possibly be credited toward a new, replacement unit. The warranty clock also does not start until the owner officially accepts the unit. If the frame is straight on the Charger, it may not actually be a write off.

Bostontoallpoints wrote:Mark777, how much training does it take to read and follow speed signs on a railroad? A seasoned engineer whether he was new on this track or not should be able to at least follow clearly marked speed indicators. If an engineer is easily distracted then they should find a different career. Too many people's lives are in danger on a railroad. I never bought into the excuse of "lost situational awareness". If the engineer is unsure of speed on the track then slow down. Radio the conductor or the dispatcher, find your milepost.

I'm an outsider to all of this, but my impression is that the track side speed signs are not meant to be the way that speed is determined on a railroad. The engineer should already know the speeds on the entire route, including any last minute changes, and should follow his/her documentation for the route, not rely on signage. In fact, some speed restrictions may not even appear on a sign, or may contradict a sign, but are still in force. The signs are just bonus confirmation.

How hard would it be for Amtrak to setup a GPS based warning system for speed restrictions? The Engineer and conductor carries the tablet or whatever with the system on it for the route , so no need to equip the actual trains.

It's pretty easy to make an app that sort of works most of the time. To make something that works reliably 99.many9s% of the time takes considerably more effort.

You can get 1m accuracy with third party hardware that plugs into a mobile device. https://bad-elf.com/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

The bigger challenge is how to incorporate this into device the controls display so that it's not a source of additional confusion. More instruments increases cognitive load.

A warning "you are going too fast" might not help if the engineer is incapacitated. It also might not help that much if the device is giving any sort of false positive warnings. The frequency of false positives may exceed the frequency of real warnings, resulting in skepticism. If a train is speeding into a curve, there may not be time to hear, understand, and verify the warning, and then hit the emergency brake.

PTC sounds like a good concept. It is automatic, nearly instant, and uses assets controlled by the railroad, and tested to work 99.many9s% of the time.