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Good news: U.S. trains may get safer

August 1, 2007

It’s time to take yet another break from the summer of bad travel news. This morning the Federal Railroad Administration announced proposed new federal safety standards that promise to improve the strength of key structural components of passenger rail cars to make them more crashworthy.

I know, it’s a lost cause. Unless they involve the busy Washington/Philadelphia/New York Metroliner service, passenger rail stories are almost completely overlooked by the mainstream travel media and by bloggers. But that doesn’t mean today’s news is unimportant.

(In 2006, Amtrak carried 3.6 million passengers on long-distance routes that are typically served by airlines. That’s a number I find difficult to ignore.)

The proposed rule is designed to preserve more space in which both passengers and train crew members can safely survive a collision, according to the government. Existing federal standards would be upgraded for cab cars and multiple-unit locomotives, requiring forward corner posts to withstand 300,000 pounds of force before failing. That’s twice the current federal requirement.

There are other new rules in the works, including tougher standards to absorb a minimum level of energy and to bend a specific distance without breaking to maximize the full potential strength of certain structural components. They would take effect in October 2009.

Trains are not dangerous — in fact, many passenger train services have already adopted these safety standards voluntarily — but they could be safer. Just browse through the NTSB news releases of examples of when things go horribly wrong.

Today’s news promises to make travel by rail a little safer. And that’s good news for travelers.

Christopher Elliott is the author of Scammed: How to Save Your Money and Find Better Service in a World of Schemes, Swindles, and Shady Deals. Critics have called it “eye-opening” and “inspiring” — it’ll “grab your attention and won’t let go.” Order your copy now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble or iTunes.

3 comments

  • Chris – Anchorage, AK

    Ever more stringent crash regulations for American passenger railroads is not the way to make rail travel safer. (For one, rail travel is already the safest mode of transportation in existence.) The FRA’s crash standards are already the toughest in the world. Rather than put band-aids on the problem, the fixes need to be done at the source: prevent collisions in the first place. Most (if not all) rail incidents come about by one of two means: impact with a trespassing passenger vehicle or impact with another train.

    To prevent the first one, Europe has it right: high-speed railways are completely grade-separated, meaning at no point along the route does a road cross the train tracks. (And by the way, European trains are built much lighter than American trains, but you don’t hear of nearly as many incidents over there.) A small effort is underway to eliminate grade crossings here in the U.S., but at tens of millions of dollars per crossing to build overpasses or underpasses, it’s going to take a lot of money to get that done. In the meantime, enhanced crossing warning devices (typically either quad-arm gates or concrete barriers, both of which prevent cars from running around closed gates) have strongly reduced vehicle incursions onto active tracks. However, while much less expensive than rebuilding the road to go over or under the tracks, they are still an expensive undertaking.

    The second case can be strongly reduced by new technology. Most instances of train collisions are due to operator error: a crew that misses a signal or overruns their authority, an engineer who miscalculates braking distance and is unable to stop in time, or a dispatcher who mistakenly gives two trains conflicting authorities. Collision avoidance systems, under testing and implementation by many railroads (from the Alaska Railroad up to BNSF), use GPS receivers and computer simulations to ensure trains don’t get too close to each other and that the engineer doesn’t speed or miscalculate his braking distance. Mandatory implementation of these systems would do more for passenger safety than increasing the crash standards fourfold.

  • Jansen

    What does it matter if it crosses the road anyways? Any train that’s built right should not be seriously damaged or derailed by any road vehicle. Europeans build their trains too light and flimsy, many of their trains stupidly do not have guards protecting the wheels either, especially the high speed ones.

  • Jansen

    Anyways, most modern european trains are not much different in weight that modern american trains. Most newer european inter city passenger cars weigh about 100000 lbs, and the locomotives are about 200000 lbs, similar to american weights.

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