Pressure rises for rail safety technology after 7 die in US crash

Seven killed in latest US rail crash

A crash that killed seven people in a train going twice the speed limit could have been avoided if track in the area had been fitted with the latest signalling equipment, a senior investigator said on Wednesday evening.

Robert Sumwalt, a board member at the National Transportation Safety Board, was speaking after an Amtrak train from Washington to New York veered off the tracks at 9.21pm on Tuesday in northern Philadelphia. The train had entered a tight curve with a 50mph speed restriction at 106mph. While the driver applied an emergency brake three seconds before the derailment, that only slowed the train to 102mph before it careered off the rails.

Much of Amtrak's busy northeast corridor is fitted with a version of Positive Train Control, a signalling system that prevents trains from passing danger signals or exceeding speed limits. But, although Amtrak plans to fit the system later this year between Wilmington, Delaware, and Trenton, New Jersey, the section where the crash occurred is currently uncovered.

"We have called for Positive Train Control for many, many years," Mr Sumwalt told reporters at a briefing. "Based on what we know right now, we believe that, had the system been installed on this section of track, this accident would not have occurred."

Amtrak said late on Wednesday that its service would remain suspended between New York and Philadelphia on Thursday.

The incident will increase pressure on Amtrak to install PTC throughout the northeast corridor by December 31, a congressionally mandated deadline that many railroads have said they will miss. Information that Amtrak published at the start of this year listed the Wilmington to Trenton section as one of the projects it intended to complete this year.

Mr Sumwalt stressed that the NTSB would make no immediate ruling on why the train was going too fast.

He said: "Our mission is to find out not only what happened but why it happened, so that we can prevent it from happening again."

Mr Sumwalt was speaking as investigators continued to check the wreckage of the train's seven carriages and single locomotive for further casualties. The death toll rose from the five announced early on Wednesday morning to seven by early afternoon.

The toll makes the crash the most serious passenger rail accident in the US since June 2009, when two Washington metro trains collided, killing one driver and eight passengers.

The incident is the second fatal train crash in 18 months in the north-eastern US involving excess speed. In December 2013, a train operated by Metro-North, a busy commuter railroad, derailed at 82mph on a bend with a 30mph speed limit at Spuyten Duyvil in New York City, killing four passengers. The driver of that train was suffering from sleep apnoea which had led him to lose concentration.

Metro-North came under pressure following that crash to accelerate its introduction of PTC.

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As investigations of the Philadelphia derailment began, the House of Representatives' appropriations committee debated amendments by Democratic members to boost Amtrak's funding. One member - Rosa DeLauro, of Connecticut - proposed $825m funding specifically for PTC. However, the Republican majority voted down all the proposed amendments.

Amtrak cancelled all services between New York and Philadelphia on Wednesday and introduced modified timetables elsewhere on the northeast corridor. The train operator had started work to repair damaged tracks on Wednesday evening, after the NTSB handed back control of the area.

It is the second serious US passenger train crash this year, following a collision in February between a Metro-North train and a car on a level crossing in Valhalla, New York. That crash - which led to a fire in the train's first two cars - killed the vehicle's driver and five train passengers.

Following Mr Sumwalt's briefing, Dianne Feinstein, the senior US senator from California, wrote on Twitter that PTC was a "life-saving technology".

"We cannot afford further unnecessary delay in its universal implementation," she wrote.

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