NTSB issues safety warning for subways, rail over defective rail
The National Transportation Safety Board on Wednesday issued a safety warning to subway systems and commuter railroads over a wheel set problem that led to a derailment in the country’s capital, saying the defect is difficult to detect and potentially devastating.
The National Transportation Safety Board on Wednesday issued a safety warning to subway systems and commuter railroads over a wheel set problem that led to a derailment in the country’s capital, saying the defect is difficult to detect and potentially devastating.
The Bureau of Investigation released a preliminary report on its ongoing investigation into the October 12 accident, which involved Washington’s subway system and ruled out other factors such as speed.
The NTSB said the fault in the carriage’s wheel and axle assembly was “not easy to identify” with a routine visual inspection, and urged transit agencies to comply with a recent Federal Transit Administration directive to carry out inspections for misaligned wheels – something that the NTSB President Jennifer Homendy called early in the investigation. The NTSB extended its warning to include commuter trains that are not fully covered by the free trade agreement.
Several transit and rail agencies have said they have carried out checks and the problem does not appear to apply to them, but the NTSB stressed the need for vigilance.
“A derailment due to wheel movements can be catastrophic,” according to the safety warning.
Most of Washington’s subway fleet has been suspended from operation since mid-October after a train car slipped off the tracks on the Blue Line near Arlington National Cemetery. According to the NTSB report, the car derailed and was then reconnected to the rails by itself on two occasions during that trip before derailing a third time. Some passengers were trapped in a tunnel in a dark train carriage and had to be evacuated on foot.
After that accident, the NTSB found chronic problems where the wheels of the Metro 7000 series, its latest railway carriage, spread too wide on the axles, allowing the carriage to slip off the tracks. The problem had been obvious to the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority since 2017, but neither the NTSB nor the WMATA board had been informed. At the site of derailment, the NTSB said the maximum speed limit was 59 miles per hour. Preliminary data from a built-in event recorder showed that the train speed was below that at around 33 mph.
“The NTSB is concerned that car 7200 was driving with a wheel set that did not meet specifications for an indefinite period of time as the car derailed three times on the day of the accident … without any noticeable indication of the problem of warning the train operator,” the warning said. “The derailment probably happened due to movement of the wheel on its axle, which should never have happened.”
The Washington Metro is expected to operate greatly reduced service at least through the end of the year.
The NTSB has stressed the importance of warnings to help “prevent the occurrence of similar accidents” in the future. “While we do not know at this time whether this is a widespread problem among rail cars in other transit agencies, the NTSB believes that action needs to be taken,” it said last month.
Safety concerns come as public transport agencies work to win back passengers and build expanded transport routes under President Joe Biden’s new infrastructure law after a devastating year of drained passenger numbers due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In Washington, the total number of riders remains at about 30% of the level before the pandemic, but it was expected to increase with the reopening of offices and renewed tourism.
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