Time to add another track on that line. Maybe that would help?
What a wonderful, sensible, rational suggestion! Unfortunately, this is in California, and the titanic business interests here have been dickering with high-speed passenger rail for decades - LA to SF! No, LA to Las Vegas! Well, let's start in Fresno and work it out later! Meanwhile, this particular section of single track includes three tunnels built in 1904, with the west tunnel exiting into a 90 degree curve (the NTSB Report says 6 degrees, but that's per each 100 feet, I believe), and what lies beyond the curve is hidden behind a giant rock formation known as Stony Point. I have previously mentioned the train near-disaster I witnessed from atop Stony Point many years ago. Fortunately, that freight was traveling slowly enough to stop within the track curve. Having a 40 mph speed limit on this section of track was a disaster waiting to happen - and it did.
RailCon BuffDaddy
OK, you do have it right on this one. The 90 degrees was the approximate total change of direction. The 6 degrees was the change of dirction in 100 feet. This method of defining the radius of railroad curves has been in use for a very long time.
Ah, "titanic business interests . . . decades, . . ." blah, blah. Another conspiricy theory. There are many reasons that the high speed railroad has not gotten started. Politics, various pressure groups, NIMBYS, it costs too much, its in the wrong place, no one is going to ride it, it will destroy the environment, it goes through the only known habitat of __, the requirement to perform studies to suit every govenment agency and pressure group affected or that think the are or might be, and on and on.
Most of all it is completely irrelvant to the issue being discussed here. Whether or not the HSR is built has no relation to the tunnel and track alignment here or any plan to do anything with it. (So far as I know there is not plan to do anything here.) Whether the tunnels were built in 1904, 2004, or 1804 is also of no significance. There clearances, grades, lining condition, and such like are significant
to the tunnels, the track, and passage of trains through them but in no shape or fashion to the accident.
When you look at the distance between the switch run through and the point of collision, is is absolutely obvious that even if the track had been straight for miles there would have been no way for the freight train to stop before hitting the Metrolink train. And: If the metrolink engineer failed to observed the signal indication that was in his face and the switch position that he could easily see if he simply looked at it, what would make anyone think he would pay attention to a freight train a thousand or so feet away if it had been positioned where he could see it?
As JIS said:
The statement that "it takes just a few miles of track to prevent it", is about as absurd as it gets. OK, so it will prevent it from happening at that point, but that still leaves many many miles of single track elsewhere. You don't build second tracks to facilitate engineers not paying attention to their signals. That is what they get paid for. You build second tracks if the capacity is needed.
Engineers who do not pay attention to their signals are derelict in their duty and should stop being engineers, and not force everyone else to pay with lives and money to put in additional tracks so that they can run red signals safely.
Engineers generally do their jobs well, that is why Surfliners and Starlight and Metrolinks don't get into such accidents.
The turnout was and is a number 20 turnout which is safe and comfortable for and had a speed limit of 40 mph. The switch was power operated. As to the run through not being noticed, this has already been explained well by Alan.
All the engine did was shove/bend the very thin ends of the switch that normally move back & forth to control which track a train moves on to. While neither you nor I could physically bend those points on the switch, it would be mere child's play for the engine to bend/shove those points. No one, save the engineer, would ever notice that those points had been bent from inside the train. To them it would feel just like every other switch that they would normally go over. Only someone standing next to the switch after the train had fully passed over it would ever know that the switch had been damaged by the engine. And that assumes that they know what to look for.
As someone who has been involved in this sort of stuff, I can say that if it were decided TODAY to add a few miles of double track west of Chatsworth including rebuilding the tunnels, it would probably be about 10 years before they would be in service, and that would be if no one fights the project. The cost I would not want to even guess, but it is reasonably certain that $100 million would not get you there. And, as has been said, this would be for capacity, not for safety reasons. The safety issues were and are being dealt with by other means. Reality says that you cannot prevent everything all the time. If you think it is possible, they you are delusional. There is not enough money in the USA to eliminate all possibilities of collisions of all kinds in all places. As Alan has said, the highest death and injury rates per mile traveled are on the roads, not the rails.
