4 Wrecks Appear Unrelated, But Investigation Under Way Cause Of Friday’s Rail Collision Has Not Been Undetermined

The crash that killed 11 people here on Friday night was the fourth major train accident so far this month, but federal officials said Saturday that the accidents appeared to have no common thread.

“We haven’t found any common denominator,” said John M. Goglia, a member of the National Transportation Safety Board, although he stressed that the investigation was just getting under way.

Investigators from the board still do not know the cause of the accident and were reluctant to speculate.

Without testimony from the commuter train’s three-person crew, who apparently were all killed in the accident, the investigators have to rely on data from computers plus an examination of mechanical parts like brakes and rails.

They are looking at several possibilities: that a signal might have failed, a crew member might have failed to notice a signal, or brakes might have malfunctioned. They also want to determine if a derailment preceded the crash.

The National Transportation Safety Board is leading a team of 75 experts investigating the crash. Technicians and engineers are analyzing the “event recorders” aboard each train that will give them information like the speed, throttle position, brake position and condition of the drive motors of each train. Working with that data, they will be able to determine, for example, if either train skidded on the snowy tracks.

The investigators are also analyzing the records from the computerized signal systems beside the track. That data should show what color each signal was at a given time, and that information can be integrated with with the data from the trains.

There are, however, new computer-based technologies that could make certain kinds of railroad accidents nearly impossible, even as the rails become increasingly crowded. Traffic is getting heavier because freight and passenger traffic are sharing a track network that has shrunk as railroads have tried to cut costs by abandoning whole lines.

The study of rail accidents has been a busy business lately. In addition to Friday’s collision here of a Amtrak cross-country train and a commuter rail car, two New Jersey Transit commuter trains collided on Feb. 9, killing two crew members and one passenger.

In addition, on Feb. 15 a runaway freight train slammed into a railroad office building in a freight yard in East St. Paul, Minn., injuring nine people, and on Feb. 1, a freight train with a cargo of hazardous chemicals derailed in a mountain pass near Devore, Calif., and erupted into flames, killing two crew members and closing the main highway between Los Angeles and Las Vegas, Nev.

Officials insist, though, that train travel is, on average, much safer than most other transportation modes.