A railroad track switch locked into the wrong position apparently caused an Amtrak passenger train to crash into a stationary freight train in South Carolina at 2:30 in the morning, Sunday February 4, killing two Amtrak employees and injuring 116 people.
Amtrak Train 91 was traveling south and should have continued straight down the tracks, but the rail switch had been manually set to divert the train onto the sidetrack where the CSX train was parked. A padlock held the switch in place. Video from the front of the train had been recovered and sent to NTSB headquarters in Washington for inspection.
Lexington County spokesman Harrison Cahill said 116 people were injured and transported to hospitals, with injuries ranging from scratches to broken bones.
Two Amtrak employees: train engineer Michael Kempf, 54, of Savannah, Georgia, and a conductor, Michael Cella, 36 of Orange Park, Florida, were killed.
NTSB Chairman Robert Sumwalt said the crash could have been avoided if positive train control — a system that combines GPS, wireless radio and computers to monitor trains and stop them from colliding, derailing or speeding — had been in place. Railroad companies have until the end of 2018 and possibly two more years afterward to implement PTC.
Richard Anderson, Amtrak CEO and president, said the signal system along the section of track where the crash occurred was down and the tracks were being manually controlled by CSX. Sumwalt confirmed the tracks were owned and operated by CSX.
Sunday’s accident was one of several fatal incidents involving an Amtrak train in the past few weeks. In December, an Amtrak train derailed near DuPont in Washington state and hurtled off an overpass onto Interstate 5, killing three people.
On February 1, an Amtrak train carrying members of Congress to a Republican retreat in West Virginia stuck a truck near Charlottesville, VA. And in mid-January, a pastor and his wife were killed in Nash County in North Carolina when their SUV was hit by an Amtrak train. That crash occurred after the driver maneuvered the vehicle around the lowered crossing arm.
“Even now Satan is at work. In accidents and calamities by sea and by land… in every place and in a thousand forms, Satan is exercising his power. These visitations are to become more and more frequent and disastrous. Destruction will be upon both man and beast.”
Source References
· 2 killed, 116 hurt when Amtrak train crashes into stationary freight train