The railroad industry has been slow to develop technology aimed at preventing train collisions like the one that killed two Conrail crewmen in northwest Ohio on January 17, an official with the National Transportation Safety Board says.
"It is very difficult for me to rationalize why the industry is not moving forward with this," said Barry Sweedler, director of the Office of Safety Recommendations for the NTSB, in an interview with The Toledo (Ohio) Blade.
One of the Conrail locomotives involved in the fatal January 17 collision.
But rail and government officials say the technology known as positive train separation isn't ready yet for widespread use.
Roger Bell, 57, of Oregon, Ohio, and Raymond Corell, 52, of Angola, Ind., died when their westbound train hit a train in front of them in the night fog Jan. 17 near Bryan, about 50 miles west of Toledo. An eastbound train hit debris from the crash. Brother Bell was a member of BLE Division 457 in Toledo.
Sweedler maintains that positive train separation has been proven to improve rail safety and productivity.
He said the system uses data gathered by either satellites or ground-based
transmitters to determine if one train is getting too close to another or
if a train is too rapidly approaching a required stopping point.
The system uses a train's location and speed to calculate a safe-braking distance in relation to trains or problems ahead.
"Anytime a train does what it's not supposed to do, PTS would take over," he said. "The system knows whatever is expected of the train."
The NTSB recommended its installation on major rail lines following a January 1987 collision in Maryland between Conrail engines and an Amtrak train that killed 16 people. The system has been on the NTSB "Most Wanted" list of safety improvements since 1990.
Since then, there have been dozens of train collisions that the system could have prevented, Sweedler said.
But Chuck Dettmann, executive vice president of safety and operations for the Association of American Railroads, a Washington, D.C., group that seeks to improve rail safety, said that if the technology was ready for widespread use, railroads would be using it.
The railroad industry would not have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on system development if it did not believe in the concept, he said.
He said the system worked in a confined area in Minnesota, but did not have the design needed for expansion. Tests are planned or under way at 10 spots throughout the country.
"If there was a ready solution, we would all welcome it," Dettmann said.
Pamela Barry, a spokeswoman for the Federal Railroad Administration, said that agency is satisfied with the pace of the technology's development.
"We've been working with the railroads very aggressively on this," she said.
A westbound Conrail freight, TV-7, was stopped or had just begun to move ahead after waiting for MGL-16, an empty steel train traveling eastbound, to pass. TV-7 apparently wanted to cross onto the other track so it could pass a slower train ahead of it.
A westbound mail train with three engines, Mail-9, crashed into the rear of TV-7. The collision caused a fiery explosion and sent derailed engines and cars from Mail-9 into the middle of the passing MGL-16, which caused several cars from that train to derail as well.
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