On the night of May 12,  2015, an Amtrak Northeast Regional train, Train 188, headed towards New York City from Washington D.C.  The train derailed at the Northeast Corridor in the Port Richmond area in Philadelphia. Of the two-hundred-and-thirty-eight people aboard, eight were killed and over two hundred injured, with eleven of them being critical injuries.

Even though the crash happened almost a year ago, citizens are still asking lots of questions as to how this could have happened. While the incident is still under investigation, emerging details lead us to believe that the derailment was merely an accident. The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), stated that the derailment was most likely an accident and could have been prevented if Positive Train Control (PTC), which is a speed limiting system that is in place on most of the rest of the Northeast Corridor. PTC works by implementing a speed display and control unit on the train and having some way of informing the display and control unit of changes in the track and signals.  PTC was not enabled on that portion of the track yet because of regulatory requirements. The portion of the track that the incident occurred on also did not have Automatic Train Control (ATC), which would have also limited the train’s speed entering the corner.

The train’s black box recording shows that the train entered the corner at one-hundred-and-six miles per hour, which is roughly double the speed of the fifty mile per hour zone implemented at that corner. ATC was installed on the Northbound track shortly after the accident happened. This incident is said to be deadliest on the Northeast Corridor since the crash in 1987 in Baltimore County, Maryland, which resulted in the death of sixteen people. The derailment of this train isn’t the first time a big accident happened on this track, and more specifically, at the very same corner.

In 1943, at six in the evening on September 9th, the Congressional Limited, Pennsylvania Railroad’s premier train crashed on the same corner after it’s journal box on car seven overheated, causing the front axle to snap. There were sixteen cars on it because the company anticipated high use of the train because of Labor Day weekend. There were five-hundred-and-forty-one people on that train and one-hundred-and-seventeen were injured while seventy-nine lost their lives.

Amtrak said that in light of the Philadelphia derailment, they are making sure that ATC is installed on the corner and throughout that entire section so it can automatically reduce the speed of the train down to forty-five miles per hour if the train engineer fails to do so. PTC, however, is only on two-hundred-and-six miles of the four hundred and one miles of the Northeast Corridor that Amtrak is responsible for. If Amtrak added PTC to the other two hundred and five miles it could possibly reduce the potential of a crash like this happening in the future.

Amtrak is also increasing the number of wayside signs that notify the train engineer of the maximum authorized speed that the train can travel. As the Philadelphia crash continues to be investigated by the NTSB, more details will emerge, and hopefully lead us on the right track, to figure out whose fault the derailment was, or if it actually was an accident. The NTSB concluded that, after looking through the engineer’s phone, that he was not texting or calling anyone so he was not distracted by his phone, but they are still investigating to see if there is another reason that distracted him and caused him to not notice the speed of the train entering the corner.

The derailment, as of now, is considered to be an accident and will be thought as such until it can be proven otherwise. In the meantime, Amtrak is beginning to work on making their railroads safer to prevent an accident of this degree from repeating itself.