Officials review '18 Amtrak crash that killed 2 crew members

COLUMBIA (AP) - Members of the National Transportation Safety Board said Tuesday that they are tired of conducting investigations into train wrecks caused by track switches being in the wrong place.

The NTSB was meeting about another crash caused by a wrong switch - one from February 2018 that killed two Amtrak crew members and injured nearly 100 passengers when their train going full speed was sent onto a side track and head-on into a parked CSX freight train in South Carolina. Investigators said the CSX crew had failed to flip a switch back to the main track.

This type of problem happens so often that Robert Hall, the director of NTSB's Office of Railroad, Pipeline, and Hazardous Materials Investigations, couldn't give the exact number of crashes the agency has investigated caused by switches in the wrong place.

"These accidents continue to occur and will continue to occur until we get some meaningful regulations to evaluate the risk and mitigate the risk," Hall said.

The NTSB is considering requirements on better training for train crews. Investigators said the CSX crew members were not tested on procedures to assure switches were in the right place and did not fill out a form required when switches are flipped.

The board is also considering requiring slower speeds when signals that indicate whether a train should stop or continue are out. The signals on the area of track in Cayce weren't working because crews were installing a safety system called Positive Train Control that would have automatically halted the Amtrak train.

NTSB Chairman Robert Sumwalt said the GPS-based technology would greatly reduce train wrecks. The control system acts as a safety check on humans to slow trains approaching curves too fast or stop engines approaching a switch that isn't in the right place.

"Every time you flip a switch there's always the hazard of the risk of not putting it back in the right position," Sumwalt said.

Congress mandated the control system in 2008 after a commuter rail crash killed 28 in California, but several deadlines requiring its installation have been delayed by the Federal Railroad Administration.

"Does anyone want to take a guess as to what FRA did on this requirement, which was 11 years ago? It starts with an N - nothing," NTSB board member Jennifer Homendy said.

South Carolina has its own history of disastrous train wrecks because of parked train crews failing to flip switches back to main tracks. In January 2005, a Norfolk Southern train was directed down a side track and into a parked train with chlorine tankers at a textile mill in Graniteville. The gas leaked, killing nine people, and calm weather conditions may have prevented a bigger tragedy.

In the 2018 South Carolina crash, Amtrak engineer Michael Kempf, 54, of Savannah, Georgia, and conductor Michael Cella, 36, of Orange Park, Florida, were killed. Investigators said they did everything they were supposed to in the early morning hours of Feb. 4, 2018, pulling the emergency brakes as soon as they realized they were heading down the side track.

But they could only slow the train down from 57 mph to 53 mph before impact, according to the train's instruments.