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Getting the Message

January 25th, 2010

I was chatting recently with friends who were complaining about how often their high-school kids were sending text messages. In their world, the cell phone is rarely used to make actual voice contact but is instead a text machine. They even text among themselves in the same house.

Like all good parents, they urge their kids not to text while driving and hope and pray that they listen. Short of video surveillance in the car (similar to a nanny-cam in the home), hoping, praying and trusting is about all parents really can do.

Sounds an awful lot like the employee management issue that the National Transportation Safety Board raised just last week. The NTSB determined that the 2008 rail accident in Chatsworth, California, involving a Metrolink commuter train and a Union Pacific freight train, was caused by the Metrolink engineer’s prohibited use of a wireless device while he was operating the train.  The engineer failed to react appropriately to a red signal because he was distracted and text messaging at the time, the NTSB said.

The September 2008 head-on collision resulted in 25 deaths and more than 100 injuries.  As a result of its findings, the NTSB recommended that the federal government require audio and image recorders in the cabs of all locomotives and in cab car operating compartments. (A summary of the NTSB’s findings is available at: http://ntsb.gov/Publictn/2010/RAR1001.htm.).

According to records from the wireless provider, on the day of the accident both the Metrolink engineer and the Union Pacific conductor used wireless devices to send and receive text messages while on duty. The engineer also made non-business related voice calls while on duty. 

“For the transportation industry, this accident demonstrates that we must find a way to wrap our arms around the pervasive problem of transportation operators using wireless devices while on the job, whether that job is driving a bus, flying an airplane, or operating a train,” NTSB Chairman Deborah Hersman said.

The engineer’s prolific text messaging was “egregious,” Hersman added. “This was an accident waiting to happen.”

Although Metrolink bars its engineers from using wireless devices while operating a train, the private environment of the locomotive cab once the train leaves a station makes it difficult for violations of operating rules to be discovered through standard management supervision or testing, the NTSB noted. 

The NTSB also cited the lack of a positive train control system (PTC) as a contributing factor in the accident.  A positive train control system would have stopped the Metrolink train short of the red signal and prevented the accident.

Within a year of the Chatsworth crash, Metrolink installed inward-facing video cameras on its locomotive fleet. It’s too soon to know whether the NTSB’s recommendations for recorders in locomotives will gain traction in Washington and lead to wider implementation, but one thing’s for sure: the issue of distracted driving of vehicles of all kinds is on the radar screen nationally and won’t go away soon.

—by Kathy Keeney

Kathy Keeney is Publisher of the Rail Group at UBM Global Trade. She is the granddaughter of a railroader and has been writing about railroads for 25 years. She is immediate past president of The League of Railway Industry Women, and served on the board of directors for the American Short Line and Regional Railroad Association.

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