Worker dies after vehicle hit by train in Missoula rail yard

DILLON KATO dillon.kato@missoulian.com



Tom Bauer, Missoulian

Members of the Missoula County Sheriff's Office walk near a wrecked utility vehicle that was involved in a collision with a train in the Montana Rail Link yard on Monday. An adult male who worked for MRL died in the accident.

Updated 11 hrs ago

A worker died in the Montana Rail Link yard after his utility vehicle was hit by a train Monday morning.

Emergency responders were called to an area of the rail yard under the Scott Street bridge about 7 a.m. for a collision involving a train and a small utility vehicle, according to Sgt. Travis Welsh, public information officer for the Missoula Police Department.

The victim was an adult male who worked for MRL. The coroner is withholding the man’s name until his family has been notified, said Brenda Bassett, public information officer for the Missoula County Sheriff’s Office.
....

Missoula police, the Federal Railroad Administration and National Transportation Safety Board are investigating the incident.

Amtrak Crash Probe Indicates Basic Safety Measure Wasn't Deployed

Crews apparently didn’t use shunting device, seemingly violating railroad’s rules



Emergency crews investigated the Amtrak crash in Chester, Pa., on Sunday. Photo: Mark Makela/Getty Images

By Andrew Tangel, Scott Calvert and Ted Mann
andrew.tangel@wsj.com
@AndrewTangel
@scottmcalvert
Ted.Mann@wsj.com
@TMannWSJ

April 5, 2016 3:44 p.m. ET

An investigation into this week’s Amtrak crash in Chester, Pa., indicates track workers didn’t deploy a basic, decades-old safety measure that experts say could have prevented a collision that killed two workers and injured more than 30 passengers, people familiar with the matter said.

Crews performing work on a stretch of Amtrak’s heavily traveled Northeast Corridor on Sunday apparently didn’t put in place what is known as a supplemental shunting device, in apparent violation of Amtrak’s own worker-protection rules, these people said. The device, which is clamped to the track, completes an electrical circuit to alert the signaling system that the track is occupied.

Had a shunt been used, Amtrak’s computerized collision-avoidance system known as positive train control, or PTC, could have prevented the accident, said Steven Ditmeyer, a former federal railroad official and Virginia-based consultant who has advised the U.S. government and transportation industry groups but not Amtrak.

“It would have triggered the signal system, which would have triggered PTC,” Mr. Ditmeyer said of the shunting device. “I can think of no reason that there would not be a shunt in place” when maintenance is under way.

U.S.

Rail Industry Had Safety Technology Decades Ago

By RON NIXON NOV. 3, 2015

WASHINGTON — In 1981, while traveling on a corporate jet, Richard M. Bressler, the chairman of the Burlington Northern Railroad, hit on an idea: What if the technology used by airlines to track the location of planes and help prevent accidents was applied to the rail industry?

Mr. Bressler, an engineer by training and a former airline executive, directed a small group of his employees to come up with a similar system for the railroads. The result was a safety system called the Advanced Railroad Electronics System, or ARES, which was soon placed on several trains on a section of track in Minnesota. The system, among other safety features, allowed dispatchers to stop trains automatically if the engineer exceeded speed limits.

But after five years in operation, the project was abruptly shut down in 1993. The company cited the system’s expense and resistance from many managers who did not see how the benefits outweighed the cost of the technology. It calculated that it would have cost about $350 million to install the monitoring hardware and software on the railroad’s entire system, equal to about $580 million today.
....

The ARES system was rudimentary compared with the system the railroad industry is trying to install today, federal regulators say. Also, the older system was tested on only a few hundred miles of track with just a few trains, the regulators said, so it is not known how it would have worked in high-traffic areas like Chicago. Nevertheless, safety experts say the system proved that a technology to stop trains from colliding was feasible.

ARES was modeled after an air traffic control system then newly developed by Rockwell International for Boeing 757 and 767 jets.

In an interview, Mr. Bressler, 72, now retired and living in the Seattle area, said he had read about the system in a magazine. After finishing the article, he sent a note to senior managers asking, “Any application to locomotives?”

To oversee the project, the company hired Steve Ditmeyer, a former Federal Railroad Administration official. ... “I was just there a few weeks, and the note from Mr. Bressler landed on my desk,” Mr. Ditmeyer recalled in an interview. Some months later, after seeing a Jan. 22, 1982, advertisement in The Wall Street Journal promoting Rockwell’s “21st-century avionics for the new generation of jetliners,” he contacted the company.

“I just wrote to them out of the blue,” said Mr. Ditmeyer, who is now a transportation consultant in Virginia and an adjunct professor in the Railway Management Certificate Program at Michigan State University. The company agreed to give it a try.

Date: 04/05/16 19:00
Re: WSJ: Amtrak Crash Probe Indicates Basic Safety...
Author: tvrail

Go ahead and Google "Amtrak Crash Shunt." Besides the latest WSJ article, you will find a 1988 Philadelphia newspaper story about an Amtrak train collision with a MofW vehicle in ...Chester, PA. And you will read a discussion of 'shunting.' I thought at first the article was a day old. Then I looked at the date.

Date: 04/05/16 20:20
WSJ: Amtrak Crash Probe Indicates Basic Safety Measure Wasn’t D
Author: Lurch_in_ABQ

tvrail Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Go ahead and Google "Amtrak Crash Shunt."
> Besides the latest WSJ article, you will find a
> 1988 Philadelphia newspaper story about an Amtrak
> train collision with a MofW vehicle in ...Chester,
> PA. And you will read a discussion of
> 'shunting.' I thought at first the article was a
> day old. Then I looked at the date.

Thanks, that led to this 1989 NTSB Recommendation:
NTSB Recommendation and this:
1989 NTSB Report

Date: 04/05/16 21:03
Re: Concerns following latest NEC accident
Author: GenePoon

Here is an explanation of Supplemental Shunting Devices by a retired Amtrak MofW
supervisor who was working when they were first implemented.

Block signalling

Main article: Signalling block systems

Trains cannot collide with each other if they are not permitted to occupy the same section of track at the same time, so railway lines are divided into sections known as blocks. In normal circumstances, only one train is permitted in each block at a time. This principle forms the basis of most railway safety systems.

History of block signalling

On double tracked railway lines, which enabled trains to travel in one direction on each track, it was necessary to space trains far enough apart to ensure that they could not collide. In the very early days of railways, men (originally called 'policemen', and is the origin of UK signalmen being referred to as "bob", "bobby" or "officer", when train-crew are speaking to them via a signal telephone) were employed to stand at intervals ("blocks&quot along the line with a stopwatch and use hand signals to inform train drivers that a train had passed more or less than a certain number of minutes previously. This was called "time interval working". If a train had passed very recently, the following train was expected to slow down to allow more space to develop.

The watchmen had no way of knowing whether a train had cleared the line ahead, so if a preceding train stopped for any reason, the crew of a following train would have no way of knowing unless it was clearly visible. As a result, accidents were common in the early days of railways. With the invention of the electrical telegraph, it became possible for staff at a station or signal box to send a message (usually a specific number of rings on a bell) to confirm that a train had passed and that a specific block was clear. This was called the "absolute block system".

Fixed mechanical signals began to replace hand signals from the 1830s. These were originally worked locally, but it later became normal practice to operate all the signals on a particular block with levers grouped together in a signal box. When a train passed into a block, a signalman would protect that block by setting its signal to 'danger'. When an 'all clear' message was received, the signalman would move the signal into the 'clear' position.

The absolute block system came into use gradually during the 1850s and 1860s and became mandatory in the United Kingdom after Parliament passed legislation in 1889 following a number of accidents, most notably the Armagh rail disaster. This required block signalling for all passenger railways, together with interlocking, both of which form the basis of modern signalling practice today. Similar legislation was passed by the United States around the same time.

Not all blocks are controlled using fixed signals. On some single track railways in the UK, particularly those with low usage, it is common to use token systems that rely on the train driver's physical possession of a unique token as authority to occupy the line, normally in addition to fixed signals.