Death Rode the Rails, Indeed

The prospect of dying in a railroad accident is not something that too many Americans worry about these days.  But it was not ever thus.  In an excellent but little-known book entitled Death Rode the Rails:  American Railroad Accidents and Safety 1828-1965, economic historian Mark Aldrich reveals that in the earliest days of rail travel in the 1840s, passengers were sometimes surprised to see a thin strip of iron thrusting up through the floor of the carriage, threatening to impale them like bits of beef on a barbecue skewer.  Called "snakeheads" by the antebellum press, relatively few people were killed by these accidents, which occurred because some of the earliest railroads used a thin iron strap fastened to a wooden rail to save money, instead of a solid iron rail, and the strap would sometimes come loose from the wood, snaking its way up into the cars.  But the combination of surprise and powerlessness to avoid the accident made it particularly horrifying, and the novelty of rail travel was tarnished in the public mind by this vivid addition it made to the list of ways one could depart this earth.

While Aldrich has plenty of stories about the different ways that passengers, railroad employees, and trespassers on railroad property were injured and killed, his emphasis is on the economics of railroad safety and how economic considerations played a vital role.  He points out that even after wood-and-strap-iron rails were replaced with all-metal rails and many other safety improvements were made, traveling by U. S. rail in 1907 was still 110 times as dangerous as flying in a modern (2006) airliner.  Still, 22 fatalities per billion passenger miles did not mean that you were taking your life in your hands every time you climbed onto a train.

From the railroad companies' point of view, safety was an expense, and like every other expense, they wanted it to pay a return on investment.  Railroads were virtually unregulated by the federal government until the establishment of the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) in 1887, and for many years the ICC restricted itself to setting freight rates for interstate commerce.  Some safety ideas, such as the "block signal" system of controlling train movements, rather than sending out paper orders and hoping everyone would synchronize their watches and keep to the schedule, not only reduced accidents but increased traffic flow, leading to greater utilization of existing plant and higher profits.  The railroads liked this kind of safety measure.

On the other hand, in 1922 the ICC ordered all carriers (rail lines) with revenues over $25 million to install automatic train control on at least one passenger line.  The idea of automatic train control, which dates back to the 1800s, is that instead of relying on the engine driver to see a visual block signal and stop the train, the automatic system would directly receive the signal's command and apply the brakes.  The rail companies reluctantly complied, and by 1930 had spent $26 million to install the system on over 15,000 miles of track. 

But as Aldrich shows, automatic train control made essentially no difference in the rail safety record, did not improve productivity, and cost a great deal of money.  During the Great Depression, many carriers asked for and received permission to cut back or remove automatic train control, and the ICC relented.  However, the same technology turned out to be useful for activating signals in the driver's cab (so-called "cab signals"), which have since become a standard safety feature of great help in fog or rain where visibility of the track-side signals is obscured. 

I was unaware of all this when I blogged a few years ago about a "cornfield meet" (head-on collision) between two freight trains in Texas that killed three employees and did millions of dollars of damage.  At the time, the railroads were installing something called Positive Train Control (PTC), which is nothing but an updated electronic form of automatic train control.  So the idea has been around for more than a century, it turns out, and is just now being implemented.  But as Aldrich points out, the accidents in which PTC would have made a difference are a small percentage of all mishaps.

While Aldrich makes a great case that economics was a huge factor in railroad safety, he gives less emphasis to something that continues to drive debates about all kinds of transportation safety today:  public perception.  He does point out that the average citizen has an exaggerated horror of types of death that are grisly and out of one's control, such as the snakehead accidents.  All the statistics in the world will not comfort the lizard part of one's brain that is primally terrified by the prospect of a fiery or gory death inside some machine that you cannot influence.  But other factors, such as speed and convenience, can overcome such fears.  For example, early automobile travel (say around 1920 to 1940) was demonstrably many times as dangerous as rail travel, yet the rail lines lost most of their short-range passenger business to the automobile in that period.  Ah, but the driver of a car has at least the illusion of control, thinking that while accidents may happen to other drivers, his superior skills will enable him to avoid a crash.  Well, maybe, but the statistics said otherwise.

As you would expect, engineers come in for starring roles in Aldrich's saga.  The technical press, including editors of such publications as Railway Age, brought constructive criticism to egregious safety problems and coordinated cooperation among carriers, government institutions, and private and university researchers to bring about notable improvements in safety systems, devices, and training.  This included issues such as the quality of bridge construction.  Early U. S. railroad bridges were built with the "link-and-pin" method, and the failure of even one joint in the structure would make the whole thing fall down, which it often did.  Complex failure modes in steel rails baffled engineers and scientists for decades until a concerted effort involving inventor Elmer Sperry's electrical track inspection system and advances in metallurgy discovered how to prevent them. 

An old friend of mine summed up the goal of engineering ethics with the two-word phrase, "No headlines."  While U. S. railroads are doing pretty well today by that measure, it is the end result of many decades of improvements and safety efforts.  And Mark Aldrich has given us that history in a rewarding and highly readable volume.

Sources:  Death Rode the Rails (Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2006), by Mark Aldrich, is the source for most of my material.  I also drew on the following website for additional details about "snakeheads":  https://aaronwmarrs.com/blog/2012/02/snakeheads-on-antebellum-railroads.html.  My blog about the head-on collision in Texas is at https://engineeringethicsblog.blogspot.com/2018/08/some-answers-about-panhandle-cornfield.html.

Some Answers About the Panhandle Cornfield Meet of 2016

A “cornfield meet” in railroad parlance is a head-on collision between two locomotive engines.  Needless to say, such occurrences are avoided if at all possible.  But on the morning of June 28, 2016, two freight trains collided head-on in the Texas Panhandle, killing three people and causing an estimated $16 million in damage.  At the time I blogged about it, the only information available was news reports.  A few weeks later, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) issued a preliminary report on the accident.  While the NTSB has not made public any additional data on the accident since then, the preliminary report makes clear that human error was likely at fault.

           

The BNSF line through the town of Panhandle is a single-track line, and two-way traffic is managed with a series of sidings.  The dispatchers, probably in the Fort Worth regional train control center, planned to switch the westbound train to a siding near the town, where it would remain while the eastbound train passed by on the main line.  If the eastbound train arrived in the area of the siding too soon, before the westbound train had time to move completely from the main line to the siding, two signals were set along the main line west of the eastern switch, where the westbound train was going to leave the main line for the siding.  The first signal the eastbound train encountered was solid yellow, which means for the engineer seeing the signal to slow the train to a maximum of 40 MPH and be prepared to stop at the next signal.  The second signal was set to red, which forbids the engineer from moving any part of the train past the red signal. 

So the plan was for the eastbound train to slow down at the yellow signal and stop at the red signal, while the westbound train arrived at the eastern switch and eventually cleared the main line by running onto the siding.

What happened instead was this.  Before the dispatchers had a chance to change the eastern switch from the main line to the siding, the eastbound train passed the yellow signal on the main line going at 62 MPH and the red signal at 65 MPH, heading through the switch on the main line straight for the westbound train.  When the engineer on the westbound train saw what was happening, he managed to jump from the cab.  But his conductor died in the resulting crash, as well as the engineer and conductor on the eastbound train.  The NTSB report somewhat ruefully notes that positive train control (PTC) was scheduled to be installed on this section of track later in 2016, although planned PTC installations have suffered repeated delays in the past.

PTC is a semi-automated system that promises to reduce the chances for human error in train operations.  A PTC system would have figured out that the two trains were heading toward a collision and would have at least slowed them down, if not preventing the accident entirely.  As it stands, the physical evidence points responsibility for the accident toward the crew of the eastbound train, as they failed to respond to the clearly visible yellow and red signals in time. 

We may never know what distracted them, but people make mistakes from time to time.  And some mistakes exact a fearful penalty. 

While even one death due to preventable causes is a tragedy, some context to this accident is provided by a slim volume I have on my shelves:  Confessions of a Railroad Signalman, by James O. Fagan, copyright 1908.  It was written at a time when railroad-related fatalities (passengers and railroad employees combined) were running at about 5,000 a year, a much higher rate per train-mile than today.  Fagan’s concern was that railroad employees of his day had to deal with on-the-job pressures that encouraged them to take risks and shortcuts that flouted the rules, and that the management system was ill-equipped to discipline misbehaving employees. 

While much has changed in railroading since 1908, any system that relies on a human being’s alertness can still fail if the person’s attention flags.  And that seems to be what happened outside Panhandle, Texas on that summer morning in 2016. 

If and when PTC is installed on most stretches of U. S. railways, the hope is that fatal and costly accidents will decline to even lower levels than what we see today.  The limiting factor after that will be mechanical malfunctions, perhaps, or dispatching errors at a high enough level to overrule the PTC system.  In any case, we can expect rail travel and shipping to be even safer than it is now, which compared to 1908 is pretty safe already.

Machines and systems are deceptively solid-looking.  It doesn’t seem possible that thousands of tons of steel rolling stock and rails can change very fast.  But the way it’s used can change, and PTC promises to do that.  Eventually, I suppose that the nation’s entire rail system will be run by computers and will resemble nothing so much as a giant version of a tabletop model train, running smoothly and without collisions or hazards.  Of course, automobile drivers will still manage to stop on grade crossings and people will walk on train trestles, so those types of accidents can’t be prevented even by PTC.  To eliminate those types of accidents, we’d have to tear up the whole system and rebuild it the way the English built their rail systems from the start:  fenced-off railroad property, virtually no grade crossings (tunnels and bridges instead), and other means to keep people and trains permanently separated. 

But I suspect we as a society are not that exercised to eliminate the last possible railroad fatality from the country.  So instead, we will enjoy whatever benefits PTC brings along and hope that we personally can stay out of the way of the trains. 

And modern-day cornfield meets will at last join their ancestors as a historic footnote, a quaint disaster that simply can’t happen anymore.  Like soldiers dying on the last day of a war, the crew members who died in the 2016 accident may be among the last to depart in that singularly violent way.  But for those of us who remain, and whose continued survival depends on our being alert, whether behind the throttle of a locomotive or the wheel of a car, this story is a good reminder to keep awake and pay attention.

Sources:  The NTSB report on the June 28, 2016 Panhandle, Texas accident can be found in the agency’s listing of railroad incident reports at https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/AccidentReports/Reports/DCA16FR008-PreliminaryReport.pdf.  For those with a certain type of morbid curiosity, there is a collection of silent movies of three or four intentionally-staged cornfield meets between steam locomotives that can be viewed on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMpdpgZxt78.  Confessions of a Railroad Signalman was published by Houghton-Mifflin. 

Cornfield Meet Near Panhandle, Texas: How?

On Tuesday morning, June 28, the stretch of U. S. 60 leading east from Amarillo, Texas past the small town of Panhandle was quiet in the early morning sun.  The flat horizon was broken only by the spinning blades of a wind farm in the distance and a towering grain elevator near the double BNSF tracks, which run straight as an arrow from Amarillo east-northeast for many miles.  U. S. 60 parallels the tracks until the road nears the grain elevator, where it takes a bend southward for a quarter mile or so around the elevator and rejoins the tracks on the other side.

           

At about 8:25 AM, a BNSF intermodal freight train was heading west on one of the pair of tracks.  At the same time, a few miles west of that train, another train was heading east—on the same track. 

Railroads have faced this kind of problem ever since there were railroads.  In England, the main customers of an early form of electric telegraph were railroads, who saw in it a way of coordinating train movements on single tracks carrying two-way traffic.  Later, block signals were developed that turned red any time a train entered a section of track (or "block"), warning other trains to slow down or stop.  The main idea of double tracks is to allow only one-way traffic on each track, eliminating any chance of head-on collisions.  And most recently, a new communications and control system called Positive Train Control (PTC) has been adopted by most U. S. railways, but its implementation has been slowed by problems with radio-channel allocations and hardware issues.  On June 28, PTC was not implemented in the section of tracks that run past the grain elevator near Panhandle.

So it was that the two trains that morning, each with a crew of two, met in a fiery head-on collision that is known in railroad circles as a "cornfield meet."  One person managed to jump from the train before the collision.  Two bodies were recovered after the accident, and as of July 10, the fourth person's body had not yet been found. 

A passerby on nearby U. S. 60 made a phone video of the wreck even as it was occurring.  You can see cars flying off the track, and eyewitnesses testified to the horrific noise that seemed to go on forever.  A train running at speed can take up to a mile to stop after the brakes are applied, and it is not clear at this point when, if at all, the brakes were applied on either train.  Many trains, including those involved in the wreck, are equipped with digital video cameras and recorders at the front and rear, but the National Traffic Safety Board spokesman in charge of the NTSB investigation said that some of these were heavily damaged.  However, other data recorders on board the trains may have survived to help understand how this accident happened.

It will probably be some months before the NTSB has time to sift through the wreckage and other evidence that could show why, in 2016, it's still possible to have such an accident.  As in other railroad accidents involving fatalities in the last few years, PTC could very well have prevented this one.  If operating properly, the system calculates a safe maximum speed for the train at each point in its travels, and if another train is heading for yours, presumably it would put on the brakes in time to prevent a wreck. 

Trains are dispatched these days by means of centralized train-traffic control centers linked to the individual trains by microwave radio.  One of the dispatch centers for trains in Texas is in Fort Worth, so investigators will probably be reviewing all communications between the controllers and the two trains involved.  Like air-traffic controllers, the dispatcher's word is law as far as the in-train operator is concerned.  So if both trains were told they had a clear track ahead, and saw something that looked like a train in the distance, each might have thought the other one was on the other track instead of the same track.  With radio control, it's not clear to me how much significance the operators attach to block signals, which should have indicated a problem in this case soon enough to prevent the accident.

As train wrecks go in the last few years, this accident was not the worst in terms of fatalities.  In this space in 2013 I wrote about a commuter-train wreck in New York that killed four, and in Philadelphia in 2015 another commuter train derailed, killing eight passengers and injuring over 200.  But the Panhandle wreck is disturbing because it seems to reveal a systemic problem, either with the dispatching system or training or both.  Those trains never should have been on the same track heading toward each other in the first place.  And once they were, it sure seems like block signals should have let the drivers know something was seriously amiss.  It is likely that this accident was the product of a combination of unlikely events, each one of which by itself does not typically lead to a major tragedy. 

But to know for sure, we'll have to wait for the results of the investigation.  And hope that BNSF and the other railways can speed up their implementation of PTC, which promises to make cornfield meets as rare in the future as deaths due to runaway horse-drawn buggies. 

Sources:  I used reports on the accident from KFDA-TV in Amarillo at http://www.newschannel10.com/story/32408347/search-ends-for-body-of-conductor-killed-in-train-wreck and a video of the NTSB news conference held after the wreck at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mCBTmxKx2vA.  A video of the wreck itself can be viewed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YiPE8e-fqKU.  I blogged about PTC and train wrecks at http://engineeringethicsblog.blogspot.com/2013/12/positive-train-control-and-commuter.html on Dec. 9, 2013 and at http://engineeringethicsblog.blogspot.com/2015/05/for-want-of-spectrum-allocation.html on May 25, 2015.