ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, February 18, 1996 TAG: 9602190062
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: WASHINGTON
SOURCE: The Washington Post
The engineer of a Maryland commuter train that plowed into an oncoming Amtrak train Friday night broke rules by traveling 63 mph as he approached a stoplight and then threw the emergency brakes too late to stop before the fiery crash that killed 11 people, National Transportation Safety Board officials said Saturday night.
The violent collision during a snowy evening rush hour ripped open the lead passenger car on the MARC train and ignited a fireball, killing three MARC crew members and eight young people headed to the Washington area from a Job Corps campus in West Virginia. Authorities said eight more Job Corps youths were unaccounted for.
The impact ruptured a 1,500-gallon diesel tank on the lead Amtrak locomotive, sparking an intense fire that swept through the passenger car at the head of the MARC train.
Officials began Saturday to piece together the causes of the wreck and to notify the families of the people missing and believed dead in what rescue workers described as a frightening inferno only a few blocks from downtown Silver Spring, Md.
Many of the dead will have to be identified through dental records or DNA tests because they were dismembered and burned beyond recognition, officials said. David Fowler, a Maryland assistant state medical examiner, said Saturday that none of the dead had been positively identified.
Information gleaned from the locomotives' event recorders and other sources indicated that the MARC train passed a caution signal more than a mile before the crash scene, then stopped at a station. When the engineer left the station, he accelerated to 63 mph in an area where he should have stayed at 30 mph. Only 30 seconds before the crash, the train was moving at 63 mph, sources said. Before the impact, the train's emergency brakes were applied, but the train was still rolling at more than 40 mph when the collision occurred, sources said.
The sequence raised the possibility that the MARC engineer ignored the yellow caution signal before the station but applied the emergency brakes when he saw the red signal through the falling snow.
Destroyed in the charred wreckage were the fragile hopes of eight struggling young people, ages 16 to 23, who were trying to turn their lives around at a Job Corps program in Harpers Ferry, W.Va. Many had dropped out of school or gotten in trouble with the law and had gone into the program to avoid stiffer sentences. They had received a coveted weekend pass, a chance to return to friends and family.
Officials said 20 people, including two conductors and an engineer, were on the MARC train, which was headed for Union Station to pick up another load of commuters. The Amtrak train carried 175 passengers and a crew of 16, and none was seriously hurt.
Twenty-six people were hospitalized after the crash, and seven of them were still being treated Saturday night. None was in critical condition.
At the crash scene Saturday, police and fire officials searched through the wreckage.
``They're finding body parts still,'' said Montgomery County Executive Douglas M. Duncan, who toured the wreckage with Maryland Gov. Parris N. Glendening, State Police Superintendent David Mitchell and Rep. Albert R. Wynn, D-Md.
Duncan said the death count dropped from 12 to 11 Friday night after the remains were taken to the state medical examiner's office in Baltimore.
Glendening seemed shocked by the destruction of the MARC car, which was peeled open by the Amtrak train.
``That had to be just pure hell in there,'' he said. ``The only thing I can pray is that those people who died, died instantly.'' He said it was too soon to draw policy prescriptions from the disaster.
David L. Winstead, Maryland's secretary of transportation, said: ``In terms of what really happened, I'm not at liberty to tell you anything now. I don't want to jeopardize the investigation.''
The Chicago-bound Amtrak train had been on the same track as the MARC train to maneuver around a stopped freight train, and it was crossing back to its original track at the moment of impact, officials said. The MARC train, traveling from Brunswick, Md., to Union Station, was being pushed by a locomotive, with three passenger cars in front. Although the power plant is at the rear, it is run by an engineer seated in a cab at the front of the first passenger car.
U.S. Transportation Secretary Federico Pena said Saturday night that he is ordering the Federal Railroad Administration and the Federal Transit Administration to conduct a thorough review of rail safety technology and operating practices, from automatic stopping systems to the crashworthiness of passenger cars and fuel tanks, he said.
Maryland Transit Administrator John A. Agro Jr., who oversees MARC, declined to discuss details of the crash Saturday, but he defended the practice of using locomotives to push passenger cars as a ``standard operating practice in the railroad industry.'' Like most commuter railroads, MARC trains are pulled in one direction by the locomotive, then pushed while returning.
Pushing on the inbound trip avoids the problem of diesel noise and exhaust at the entrance to Union Station and the expense of turning trains each trip, he said.
Railroad unions and other groups have objected to the practice as unsafe, because the heavy locomotive can serve as a buffer in a crash.
The speed of the MARC train suggests that the engineer missed a first yellow signal, telling him to slow down and prepare to stop at the next signal. Under railroad rules, a train passing a yellow - or ``approach'' - signal must ``proceed prepared to stop at the next signal. Trains must immediately cut their speed to 30 mph as the engine passes the approach signal.''
Typically, signals are spaced a mile or more apart, giving trains plenty of time to slow down. Depending on its weight and other conditions, a train may take as much as a mile to stop from the 60-mph range.
If the engineer missed the yellow signal and saw only the later red signal, he could have shaved only a few miles per hour from his speed after hitting the emergency brakes, sources said.
LENGTH: Long : 116 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: AP. 1. The wreckage of the Amtrak (left) and MARC trainsby CNBmust be moved before officials will be able to finish testing the
signals to see if they worked properly. 2. Forensic experts sift
through the wreckage of a train Saturday in which 11 were killed.
color. Graphic: Illustration by KRT. color. KEYWORDS: FATALITY