SURPRISE: "WE HAVE NOT INVESTED IN RAILROAD INFRASTRUCTURE FOR MANY-MANY YEARS; BESIDES, NOBODY TOLD US THAT WE NEED TO HAVE SAFER CROSSINGS!!"
DRIVERS CRITICIZE NEW YORK CROSSING WHERE TRAIN, CAR COLLIDED
February 6, 2015
It is no secret that the railroads have invested very little money in making the crossings safer. It simply requires too much money and they have been postponing for many years the safety upgrades, until a disaster hits us. Well, folks, the disaster is upon us and we better improve the damn safety of these railroads. We are tired and alarmed of hearing of the derailments and the crashes and the collisions and the killings and the explosions and the fires and the hundreds of near misses. As we right this blog, two more people inside a car got killed in Ohio by two CSX trains consecutively.
The Westchester County rail crossing made Nicole Sanders
anxious even before she witnessed this week’s fiery fatal
collision between a commuter train and a sport- utility vehicle.
“There are a whole lot of moving parts for the driver to
consider,” said Sanders, who watched the conflagration from a window across the
street at Ladimax Sports and Fitness, where she is a personal trainer. “It’s
not a good intersection to have a train track.”
About two car lengths east of the tracks in Valhalla, New
York, Commerce Street crosses the Taconic State Parkway at an awkward angle.
Poor lighting and traffic that backs up during the evening rush can make the
crossing confusing, said Sanders.
Even so, about 1,000 cars make their way across the tracks
daily, according to the Federal Railroad Administration. The 3.1 percent
probability of a crash there makes the site the 17th most dangerous of 86
Metro-North Railroad grade crossings, according to the agency.
The Feb. 3 collision, the deadliest in Metro-North history
killed six, including the driver of a Mercedes-Benz SUV that was hit by the
commuter train. It was the first at the Commerce Street crossing since 1984,
federal records show.
Horn Blaring
Federal investigators on Thursday began to compile a better
picture of what happened that night, but said it will take much longer to
understand just how the SUV
ended up in the path of speeding train.
What they do know is that traffic lights and warnings designed
to keep the intersection clear of cars appeared to have operated properly. The
engineer of the train also sounded his horn as he approached the crossing as is
required, Robert Sumwalt, a member of the National Transportation Safety Board,
said at a news briefing.
NTSB investigators interviewed the engineer and a driver who
was directly behind the SUV that was hit, and they recovered data from the
train and warning systems at the intersection, Sumwalt said.
“The engineer reported he saw the car moving onto the
tracks,” Sumwalt said.
The engineer activated the emergency brake and blared the
horn in the seconds before impact. The SUV’s driver, Ellen Brody, a 49-year-old
mother of three, was killed, as were five people on the train.
No Complaints
The state Transportation Department hasn’t received
complaints about the crossing in at least 10 years, Beau Duffy, an agency
spokesman, said by phone. The department is waiting for the NTSB to conclude
its investigation, he said.
“Any issues they identify, we’ll take action on,” Duffy
said.
Stephen Morello, counselor to the chairman of the
Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which operates Metro- North, said the
agency is prohibited from commenting on the investigation.
The driver directly behind Brody’s SUV told federal
investigators that the woman in that vehicle had to stop on or near the tracks
because heavy traffic caused by a nearby accident was “inching along,” Sumwalt
said.
The witness tried motioning to Brody to back up, he told
investigators. Instead, Brody got back in her car, paused for a moment and then
drove into the oncoming train, according to Sumwalt.
Investigators are still trying to determine whether traffic
prevented Brody from pulling forward sooner, he said.
Treacherous Crossing
Donna Coppola, a circulation clerk at the nearby Mount
Pleasant Branch Library, said she avoids the crossing because of the confusing
intersection and harrowing track clearance. It’s treacherous and she doesn’t
drive there at night, she said.
The collision, the railroad’s sixth accident at a road
crossing in less than four years, is raising questions about whether more
should be done to make them safer. Road and rail intersections are difficult to
guard, and the time it takes for a train to stop makes it almost impossible for
an engineer to hit the brakes in time to avert a collision.
New York has 5,304 grade crossings, according to U.S.
Representative Sean Patrick Maloney, a Democrat from Newburgh. There were 81
accidents, 15 deaths and 23 injuries at grade crossings from 2012 through 2014,
according to Maloney.
Heading Home
Brody was heading home to Scarsdale, New York, from her job
at ICD Contemporary Jewelry in Chappaqua, said Varda Singer, owner of the shop.
She left around 5:30 p.m. for the 13-mile (21-kilometer) drive south, which
takes about 30 minutes when there’s little traffic.
About five minutes before Brody left, a driver headed south
on the Taconic was texting and drifted into the left lane, striking a
northbound vehicle that had stopped to make a left turn onto Lakeview Avenue,
less than a mile south of the Commerce Street crossing, according to Melissa
McMorris, a state police spokeswoman. The crash shut down the Taconic in both
directions, McMorris said.
The ensuing traffic jam caused cars to be backed up on
Commerce Street. The northbound train out of New York City was traveling at
about 58 miles per hour, under its 60 mph speed limit, as it approached the
Commerce Street crossing at about 6:26 p.m., according to the NTSB’s Sumwalt.
Creating Fireball
The impact from the Feb. 3 collision created a fireball in
the freezing night that engulfed the first train car as the Mercedes was pushed
down the tracks. Sumwalt said it took the train about 950 feet to stop after the
engineer activated the emergency brakes.
Westchester County Executive Rob Astorino said he goes
through the crossing every morning.
“It’s a dangerous intersection,” Astorino said in an
interview. “It’s confusing because people coming across the tracks are trying
to go straight across the parkway, and it’s not straight.”
The design of the electrified third rail is another area
investigators are examining, Sumwalt said. The rail, which sits above the
ground on the left side of the track, has a unique design on Metro-North, he
said.
About 400 feet of the third rail penetrated the SUV and then
entered the train’s first car, depositing the steel bars in 80 foot sections.
“The rail car is going through, kind of sucking these damn
things up, just one by one by one,” he said in an earlier interview. “I counted
about a half dozen of those that were just being inhaled as the train car goes
down the track.”