Asleep At the Throttle Prior to Near Head-On

[The Chief]

An Amtrak engineer says he fell asleep before a train carrying 128 passengers came within 400 feet of barreling head-on into a 105-car CSX freight train at 75 mph.

http://www.fox23news.com/news/state/story....F4-5052500D1327

http://www.heraldtribune.com/apps/pbcs.dll...1/APN/404011200

Yikes.

 

[Amfleet]

Almost reminds of the Chase, MD accident several years back when an Amtrak train traveling 120mph slammed into two Conrail locomotives that had bi-passed several restriced signals. This was due to the Conrail engineers being high at the time. No different than falling asleep at the wheel of a locomotive, but this time Amtrak got lucky.

 

[amtrakmichigan]

I remember reading when this close call happened, that both the CSX and Amtrak train were placed into emergency braking. It sounds to me that the alerter was ignored because the engineer was asleep and the train was automatically put into emergency braking. Then again doesn't the alerter go off every 60 seconds? which would make me beleave that the engineer somehow hit the alerter button while he was asleep, kind of like what you may do in the morning hitting the off button on your alarm clock without waking up and going back to sleep.

Something else I thought off too is this... ( I guess this would depend on how far apart the blocks are set on this stretch of track) As the CSX train was aproaching signals toward the Amtrak train, the CSX signals should have been getting more restrictive as he was getting closer to Amtrak, to the point of even having a STOP or RESTRICTING signal. The CSX engineer may have had a CLEAR or SLOW CLEAR a block or two back then all of the sudden run upon a RESTRICTING or STOP signal. IF this happened it may have tipped off the CSX crew that something wasn't right.

I guess I don't understand how the Amtrak train ran at least a couple STOP signals (acording to one report I read) and the alerter didn't put the train into emergency earlier then it did without the engineer hitting the button somehow in his sleep.

 

[battalion51]

Well from what I know, two of the three signals the Amtrak Engineer passed were very close together (within half a mile of each other). Now since he did fall asleep "at the wheel" this probably means he also missed the Approach and/or Advance Approach signals (for a full explination of signals and their meaning check out this page on my site). As far as the alerter goes, it's a beast that I have yet to comprehend. In all essence the Alerter is supposed to go off every minute to two minutes where the Engineer hasn't performed any activities on the Engine (throttle up or down, brake reductions, horn, bell, sand, etc.). But, several time I've seen cases where an Engineer has been in the middle of brake reductions and the alerter goes off, so there's no telling as to how the alerter thinks. It's also possible that the Engineer was applying pressure to the alerter while he was asleep, as many Engineers will rest their right hand right next to the alerter. Short of seeing the tapes myself their's no way any of us can really tell what happened here.

 

[Save Our Trains Michigan]

The Alerter will go off evrey 30sec or so if you keep your hand on it.It will still go off you have to hit the alerter button or throtle or even the horn button and it will reset the alerter.