Railroad Disasters

The deadline for installing and implementing positive train control, known as PTC, is Dec. 31, 2018. It likely will come and go, with a majority of the country’s railways basically arguing they don’t have enough resources to meet it. Industry leaders testifying in front of the House Subcommittee on Railroads, […]

Penny-Pinching on Positive Train Control  Amtrak trains have been involved in four deaths since December 2017, including the most recent tragedy in South Carolina that killed two crew members and injured more than 100 passengers. The engineer of the Miami-bound train, 54-year-old Michael Kempf, of Georgia, died after crashing into […]

Reports are developing that the recent and tragic crash of an AmTrak train, running on CSX rails, might have been avoided if a safety feature called a “positive train control” (PTC) had been employed at the time. This is technology what one of our firm’s partners wrote about on May […]

Another tragedy on an AMTRAK train has caused the loss of lives and serious injuries in Dupont, Washington this morning. There are reports the train, the Cascades service from Seattle to Portland was travelling on tracks rated at a maximum speed of 79 mph, while the Cascades was reported to […]

Avoidable Tragedy A few days ago, it was a Philadelphia train derailment that claimed (7) dead and over 130 injured. Since 1991, the railway industry led by CSX has been trying to assure the public that rail transportation is just fine. As, Pulitzer Prize winning author David Johnston discovered in […]

Can Positive Train Control Help Prevent Another Train Accident? After most tragedies involving the loss of life and hundreds of injured people, we reflect on: what could have been done to avoid this? What safety measures were in place or should have been in place that might have limited the […]