Location is near the SC Capital at Cayce, SC. The county coroner confirms 2 deaths. This is the Railroad nightmare, 2 trains on same track going opposite directions. Tracks are owned by CSX and the controllers are probably theirs. AMTRAK rents usage to use the same but their trains are frequently required to ‘give way’ to high-speed freight.
Possible causes are signal failure, human inattention failure, controller failure or computer failure. Would guess that NTSB (National Transportation Safety Board) is on its way or there already. They have the national investigation authority, I believe.
FYI: train travel in the US is much safer than driving as computed by passenger miles. If you want to see horrific train stats, go to India, we don’t hear much about their RR Accidents but they have them.
God Bless the dead & injured and their families.
I recently read that one of the current problems in railroad safety is that the National Transportation Safety Board has been without a director for quite some time now because the Dems refuse to confirm Trump’s pick for the position. It’s true that federal agencies don’t do much, generally, but this one is in charge of investigating civilian accidents and coordinating policies in response to them.
[self-reply] Thinking about this further, I am willing to wager that this is a 'side-swipe' type event. I think that the passenger train was slow or stopped on a siding track to allow the CSX freight to go through and the AMTRAK engineer had it pulled too far forward (in the dark) so that it 'impinged' on the freight train's passage.
If this was head-on, there would be a lot more death and damage. With 'just' the lead engine and other cars derailed, the above seems to be likely. We will just have to see what is reported in the light of day.
Thank you for level-headed thinking.
Don’t know what the operating speeds are on that track and if it was a single track operating area, but CSX was decimated by that “railroad genius” E Hunter Harrrison who died rather suddenly last month. Many thousands of layoffs and a complete redesign of the schedule and operating systems...too much to get into here...could have been a factor.
I’m thinking the Amtrak engineer didn’t get his train completely onto the spur to allow the freight to pass. I hate to see this as I really do enjoy traveling by train across America.