Quote:

Washington Post
Federal safety officials are focusing on why a railroad switch was set in the wrong position sending an New York-to-Miami bound Amtrak train with more than 140 people aboard off the main line and onto a side track where it collided with an empty freight train early Sunday.
Two people were killed and 116 injured in the crash that occurred around 2:35 a.m. in Cayce, S.C., a few miles south of Columbia, officials said. The two men who died were Amtrak employees — the engineer and conductor who were riding in the front of the train.

The Lexington County coroner identified the victims as engineer Michael Kempf, 54, of Savannah, Ga., and conductor Michael Cella, 36, of Orange Park, Fla.

The crash caused the lead engine and “some passenger cars” to derail, Amtrak officials said. The CSX train was parked on a track next to the main railroad line and was empty, according to South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster (R).

In a briefing with reporters Sunday afternoon, Robert Sumwalt, chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board, which is investigating the crash, detailed what is known so far.


The Amtrak train, traveling on tracks owned and maintained by freight railway giant, CSX, was supposed to pass over the switch to continue on to the main line tracks, but instead was directed onto the pad-locked crossing into a portion of track known as “siding” which was occupied by a parked CSX train, Sumwalt said.

“For whatever reason that switch was, as they say in the railroad industry, ‘lined and locked,’” he said. “Which basically means it was aligned for the train coming this way to be diverted into the siding.”

“Key to this investigation [is] why that switch was lined that way,” Sumwalt said.

He said investigators have recovered the front-facing video camera from the Amtrak train and that it has been sent to labs at NTSB headquarters in Washington, D.C., where it will be reviewed. The footage will be important because it can offer details about what happened in the minutes before the collision.

However, he added that investigators have been unable to recover the event data recorders from either train in part because of the extent of the damage.


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