Results tagged “trains”

The National Transportation Safety Board today issued what it's calling an "urgent safety recommendation" to the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, based on the preliminary findings of its investigation into the fatal June 22 Red Line crash. Despite the fact that the investigation has not yet concluded and the NTSB has yet to say officially what they believe was the cause of the accident, they have gone ahead and told WMATA that the transit agency needs to adopt "enhanced safety redundancy" of its train control system. Here's what they said:

A recent accident on the Metrorail's Red Line between the Fort Totten and Takoma stations has shown that WMATA's train control system is susceptible to a single point failure because it did not fail safe and stop a train when detection of a preceding train was lost. The urgent safety recommendation issued today calls for WMATA to evaluate track occupancy data on a real-time basis in order to detect losses in track occupancy and automatically generate alerts to prompt such actions as immediately stopping train movements or implementing appropriate speed restrictions to prevent collisions.

Continue reading "WMATA: Trains Will Operate in Manual Mode For a Long Time"

Another weekend, another bunch of Metro maintenance-based delays to report. We suppose we can take solace in the fact that those of you on the Yellow Line are finally getting a much-deserved break this weekend.

The Post reports that the body of an adult male was found on the tracks near Union Station shortly before 8 a.m. today. At the time, MARC reported that trains on the Camden and Brunswick lines had come to a complete stop in both directions due to the police investigation. Both lines were reopened by 10 a.m., but those caught in the morning commute mess had to take Metro in to D.C. after MARC trains were sent back to Greenbelt and Silver Spring stations, respectively. The death remains under investigation. On Sunday, an apparent double suicide in Baltimore County resulted in two deaths on a set of CSX train tracks there.

A typical weekday morning for yours truly involves catching the next train out of Van Ness-UDC to Dupont Circle. And more often than not, there's a train waiting for me at the station when I get there. No problems, right?

Hopefully, you didn't miss us too much last week. But it seems that we weren't the only transit columnists that got stuck on Amtrak during last weekend's travel.