DuPont, Washington Fought to Keep Amtrak Out Before Killer Crash

DuPont, Washington Fought to Keep Amtrak Out Before Killer Crash
Officials warned a new route for a high-speed passenger train would be a disaster. The first trip proved them right.
Winston Ross
12.18.17 10:39 PM ET


DuPONT, Washington — Shawna Gasak was on her way to work in this bedroom community south of Tacoma on Monday morning when she saw traffic backed up past the start of the on-ramp to Interstate 5 south. She skipped it and headed onward, across an overpass, scanning the freeway as she crossed, to spot what she figured was a car accident.

What she saw was a train car dangling off a bridge, above dozens of stalled vehicles. She would later learn that an Amtrak-operated train carrying about 80 passengers and seven crew members en route from Seattle to Portland had derailed, spilling 13 cars off of the track, killing at least six and injuring dozens of others. The train was on its inaugural run along a brand-new route that cost $181 million and that promised to shave ten minutes off of the journey.

“I didn’t think it was real,” Gasak told The Daily Beast. “This is our worst nightmare.”

Gasak is a city councilwoman in DuPont, and what she means by “our worst nightmare” is that she and dozens of other community leaders have fought against the redirection of this stretch of railway for years, worried that shifting the line through quiet DuPont was an idea that would end in tragedy.

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“Most of the wreckage is outside the curve. The track looks like it’s in decent shape. It’s not torn up.” That suggests the cars and the locomotive pulling them simply flew off those rails, a concept supported by that 30 to 80 mile-per-hour differential, Quimby said.

“Pencil out the physics,” DuPont City Councilman Michael Gorski told The Daily Beast. “That’s pretty fast.”

The chief complaint among locals about the new Amtrak route was centered entirely around speed. The line includes several “at grade” crossings, which is a jargonistic way of saying the train plows right through a series of intersections well traversed by cars and an alarmingly increasing number of trucks. An Amazon Fulfillment Center and FedEx Ground Center both opened recently in DuPont, adding traffic bottlenecks close to several of those at-grade crossings. As the traffic backs up, trucks are routinely stuck on those railroad tracks.

In 2013, the nearby city of Lakewood sued the Washington Department of Transportation, which owns the line, arguing that the government had failed to properly study the effects of running this new route, a failure that could one day kill people. The government prevailed and moved its railroad anyway.

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https://www.thedailybeast.com/dupont-washington-fought-to-keep-amtrak-out-before-killer-crash