Amtrak restoring service to full Northeast Corridor

PHILADELPHIA – Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor trains will resume service today in “complete compliance” with federal safety orders following last week’s deadly derailment, officials announced Sunday.

Company President Joseph Boardman said Amtrak staff and crew have been working “around the clock” to restore service along the route between Washington and Boston following Tuesday night’s crash that killed eight people and injured more than 200 others.

Federal regulators on Saturday ordered Amtrak to expand use of a speed-control system long in effect for southbound trains near the crash site to northbound trains in the same area.

Railroad Administration spokesman Kevin Thompson said Sunday the automatic train control system is now fully operational on the northbound tracks. Trains going through that section of track will be governed by the system, which alerts engineers to slow down when their trains go too fast and automatically applies the brakes if the train continues to speed.

Investigators with the National Transportation Safety Board, meanwhile, have focused on the acceleration of the train as it approached the curve, finally reaching 106 mph as it entered the 50-mph stretch north of central Philadelphia, and only managing to slow down slightly before the crash.

“The only way that an operable train can accelerate would be if the engineer pushed the throttle forward. And … the event recorder does record throttle movement. We will be looking at that to see if that corresponds to the increase in the speed of the train,” board member Robert Sumwalt told CNN’s “State of the Union.”

The Amtrak engineer, who was among those injured in the crash, has told authorities that he does not recall anything in the few minutes before it happened.

Investigators have also been looking into reports that the windshield of the train may have been struck by some sort of object, but Sumwalt said on CBS’s “Face the Nation” program on Sunday that he wanted to “downplay” the idea that damage to the windshield might have come from someone firing a shot at the train.

“I’ve seen the fracture pattern; it looks like something about the size of a grapefruit, if you will, and it did not even penetrate the entire windshield,” Sumwalt said.

Officials said an assistant conductor on the derailed train said she heard the Amtrak engineer talking with a regional train engineer and both said their trains had been hit by objects. But Sumwalt said the regional train engineer recalls no such conversation, and investigators had listened to the dispatch tape and heard no communications from the Amtrak engineer to the dispatch center to say that something had struck the train.