Recently ordered improvements, delivered in response to the derailment, have been borrowed from Metro-North's sister agency, the Long Island Rail Road, and at times from the Metro-North system itself.
Changes significant enough to have thwarted the crash, according to rail experts, were simple enough to have been completed within days. Others are so straightforward that some of the authority's board members assumed they had been in place for years. While the authority and federal investigators have cautioned that a full accounting of the derailment is not yet complete, many transit officials have arrived at a troubling conclusion since the crash: The authority could have — and in many cases should have — installed a series of protections long before the train's operator apparently became dazed at the controls early that Sunday morning, racing into a sharp curve at nearly three times the allowable speed.
For a railroad long considered the gold standard for the region's commuter systems — in 2011 it became the first American railroad to win a coveted international award for design excellence — the focus of much of the rail industry has in recent days turned to why Metro-North lacked safety features that had been in place on some other railroads for years.
"My belief was always that safety was first," said a board member, Ira Greenberg.
Now, he said, "you start to question that."
Last week, the Federal Railroad Administration announced a review of Metro-North's operations and "safety culture," the first time the agency has conducted such an investigation of a passenger railroad. On Monday, board members are expected to discuss the derailment when they meet for the authority's first public meeting since the crash.
So far, the authority has suggested that second-guessing would accomplish little.
"What could have happened, what should have happened, it hasn't entered my mind," Thomas F. Prendergast, the authority's chairman, said. "We're focused on trying to ascertain exactly what happened." In a letter to the railroad administration a few days after the Dec. 1 crash, Mr. Prendergast acknowledged the "hazards revealed" by the derailment. Last week, responding in large part to an emergency order issued by the railroad administration, the authority said it had upgraded its signal system near the crash site, just north of the Spuyten Duyvil station, to warn operators of the reduced speed limit in the curve and brake the train automatically if it were not traveling at or below 30 miles per hour.
The existing cab signal network, which communicates information from the rails to an operator's console, has long included the ability to enforce speed limits if modified accordingly. But until the crash, the system had been used only to warn of other trains or red signals ahead, with a goal of avoiding collisions.
By contrast, a system to enforce speed limits on certain sections of track has been in place at several points on the Long Island Rail Road for years. New Jersey Transit said its cab signaling system also enforced speed restrictions at a series of curves. And last year, the authority said that Metro-North's own Port Jervis line would add a new signal system to enforce speed restrictions.
Officials expect that the Metro-North's signaling system at four other potentially dangerous curves and five bridge sites will be similarly modified by next year.
Asked why broader changes to Metro-North's signal system were not made sooner — particularly at well-known curves like the one at Spuyten Duyvil — Marjorie Anders, a spokeswoman for the authority, said it was the job responsibility of train operators to "know all the physical characteristics, including the speed limits" in all areas where they were qualified to work.
For more than 30 years, she said, "that system worked fine," with no accident-related passenger fatalities since Metro-North was created in 1983. The recent changes were "a result of the intense introspection currently underway at Metro-North," she said.
Anda sedang membaca artikel tentang
Metro-North Seen Lagging in Protection Against Crash
Dengan url
https://dunialuasekali.blogspot.com/2013/12/metro-north-seen-lagging-in-protection.html
Anda boleh menyebar luaskannya atau mengcopy paste-nya
Metro-North Seen Lagging in Protection Against Crash
namun jangan lupa untuk meletakkan link
Metro-North Seen Lagging in Protection Against Crash
sebagai sumbernya
0 komentar:
Posting Komentar