Rob
Sherman Advocacy
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Rob
Sherman Advocacy
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"Fighting injustice, one victory at a time."
Two more people have died and over two hundred more people were injured, yesterday, in the second fatal railroad train wreck in a week. The reason for yesterday's wreck is obvious: Human error, but that's exactly why we need seat belts on railroad passenger cars. People make mistakes. People screw up. Seatbelts, however, would have protected most of those who got hurt.
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There's no reason for human error involving railroad trains to result in mass casualties.
Yesterday's train wreck occurred in the Los Angeles suburb of Placentia. A commuter train from Riverside was headed west towards Los Angeles. The train was supposed to turn south at a junction in Placentia to go to San Juan Capistrano, so the train apparently crossed over to the southern pair of tracks (normally the eastbound pair) from the northern pair (normally the westbound pair) to make the turn. This is a common practice and procedure in railroading. This is the way it's done all across the country, and it's perfectly safe, so long as the dispatcher and any train going in the opposite direction are paying attention to what's going on.
After the westbound commuter train crossed over to the southern pair of tracks and a block or two before it got to the junction, it was struck by an eastbound freight train, which was also on the southern pair of tracks. The freighter went through the junction, eastbound, just before the commuter made it to the junction, westbound.
Somebody screwed up. There is a BNSF dispatcher in a control room somewhere in the Los Angeles area who directs trains on BNSF tracks in the region as to where to go and when to go there. Either the freighter ran a stop signal or the dispatcher didn't give the stop command. Either way, somebody screwed up, but that's no reason for all those people to die or be injured. If the passengers were wearing seatbelts, they would have been jostled, but would have remained essentially unharmed in their seats. Sure, there might have been a few injuries in the crush zone on the passenger train, but you wouldn't have had 265 of the 300 passengers on board (see Metrolink news release) killed or injured.
According to news reports in today's Los Angeles Times the usual happened upon impact: People went flying through the air until they hit something very hard that stopped them, causing countless broken bones, busted heads, wrenched backs and necks, and at least two deaths.
"In one jarring instant, [Metrolink conductor Patrick] Phillips and the passengers aboard Metrolink Train 809 found themselves flying through the air, banging into walls and tables and each other in a screaming, bloody whirl. Nearly all of the double-deck train's 300 commuters suffered some sort of injury and two of them died in a collision with a Burlington Northern Santa Fe freight train," said a story in the Los Angeles Times entitled In an Instant, Commute Turns to Bloody Chaos.
The LA Times story goes on to quote Phillips as saying that he told passengers to "buckle up." This would seem to imply that there were seat belts on the train. I checked the facts on that one by calling the news media contact at Metrolink Trains. She told me that what the conductor actually said was, "Buckle down," as in "brace yourself," but that the trains do not have seat belts. I asked her if Metrolink was looking into the propriety of adding seatbelts. She said that the National Transportation Safety Board and Metrolink officials were looking into whether or not seat belts might have made a difference (what do you think the answer to that question is going to be?) and whether or not seatbelts should be added in the future. A determination on the obvious question is not expected for about three months.
I will continue the Rob Sherman Advocacy project to get seatbelts on all forms of public transportation, including school busses, inter-city busses, commuter busses, intercity trains like the Amtrak train involved in the unnecessarily-fatal wreck last week and commuter trains like the Metrolink train that was involved in the unnecessarily-fatal wreck this week.
I ask for your financial assistance in pursuing this project. Pursing Rob Sherman Advocacy projects takes most of my time and money for expenses like travel and communications. Please help cover part of those costs.
Rob Sherman P. O. Box
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