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Metro-North was rife with problems before accidents: NTSB documents

Ken Valenti
klvalent@lohud.com
Emergency personnel work at the scene of a Metro-North train that derailed just north of the Spuyten Duyvil station in the Bronx Dec. 1, 2013. Four people were killed and dozens more were injured when the Manhattan bound train derailed shortly after 7:00 a.m.
  • Federal documents show Metro-North was rife with problems
  • Railroad has taken steps to improve safety

The break in a bar joining railroad tracks that derailed a Metro-North train in Bridgeport, Connecticut last year, causing an accident that injured dozens, came not long after other joint bars had broken in the same area, according to documents from federal investigators.

The trainee who allowed rail cars to resume running too early on a track in nearby West Haven, leading to the death of track foreman Robert Luden, had given his superiors reason to question his abilities, other testimony and documents from the investigators show.

Those are among the revelations in a mountain of data released this month by the National Transportation Safety Board as it draws to a close on five investigations into accidents on Metro-North tracks.

The railroad, one of the two busiest in the nation, was enjoying growing ridership and a reputation for on-time performance in 2013 when a series of problems struck, some tragic, beginning with the May 17, 2013, derailment in Connecticut that injured 76. It reached its worst moment with the Dec. 1 derailment in the Bronx that killed four and injured dozens.

The NTSB data, thousands of pages of testimony and railroad records, paint a picture of a railroad that was teetering from cracks below the surface.

"You know, it didn't just happen a year ago and just manifest itself," Thomas Prendergast, chief executive of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority told the NTSB in March. "This has been manifesting over time."

In the wake of the string of accidents, the railroad has taken various steps to resolve the problems and enhance safety, including new speed restrictions and stepped-up inspections.

The NTSB has not released final determinations on what caused the incidents, which also include a CSX train derailment in the Bronx, and the death of another Metro-North worker who apparently went on the wrong track during a job in Manhattan. The agency expects to release final reports next month.

But the documents offer a detailed look into the railroad's operations and culture. It is the same data that showed William Rockefeller, the engineer with a sleeping disorder who drove the train that toppled on a sharp curve in the Bronx, had exceeded the speed limit 14 times in the week before the fatal crash.

It also showed that too many rail joints meant to be temporary were left in place, rail traffic controllers worked seven days in a row for weeks on end and maintenance workers were edged out of track time by the crews that run the trains.

"We end up running short-handed," Richard Kerner, assistant director of track maintenance, told the NTSB in July 2013. "Between not getting track time, between losing people and not … having enough supervision out there, and not enough management, you're expected to do more and more with less and less, and it just keeps spiraling."

Railroad President Joseph Giulietti has said since taking the job in February that priorities would be changed and safety would come first. The new train schedules that began in May are designed to allow more flexibility to take sections of track out of service for repair, railroad spokesman Aaron Donovan said.

"Employees are being made aware that the maintenance division has the ultimate say about when a track goes back to service, not the operations division," he wrote.

As the railroad turned 30 years old last year, retirements also sapped the staff of valuable experience, longtimers said.

"It's been the biggest turnover ... Metro-North's ever had in this year and a half," Stephen Neville, deputy chief of train operations, told the NTSB. "I mean, I have a roster of 68 actual rail traffic controllers, and I have right now more than — or close to half with less than 4 years' experience."

The railroad lost more than a dozen rail traffic controllers over two years, Neville told the NTSB.

His testimony came after track foreman Robert Luden, 52, was killed May 28, 2013, when an inexperienced rail traffic controller, hired six months earlier, allowed train traffic through too early on a track that had been taken out of service for work.

The trainee, Omar Bell, came to the railroad with experience as a bus and taxi dispatcher, and his superiors questioned whether he could handle the high-pressure job.

A 3-month job evaluation released in the records shows him getting marks of "unacceptable," "barely acceptable" and "fair" in all categories. But Neville, who signed the evaluation, said in testimony that Bell did score "good" in some categories.

"Two rail traffic controllers I interviewed didn't think he was going to make it," Neville said. "One thought with more time, he might be able to handle (one of the slower territories.) He wasn't going to be a superstar."

Donovan said Bell was never hired as a permanent employee, and the controller who was supervising him that day was reassigned to a job where he does not control train movements. (Bell's attorney, Joseph Solow, did not return calls for this article.)

Donovan said more employees have been hired. Since Jan. 1, 2011, 259 employees have left Metro-North. Of those, 196 retired and 63 resigned, were terminated or died, the railroad said. Over that same period, Metro-North hired 308 people, Donovan said.

Metro-North hired 16 rail traffic controllers since the start of 2013, and has slashed the need to call in controllers on their rest days by 62 percent, Donovan said.

The railroad has also reorganized in its safety efforts. That includes centralizing all training under a vice president who reports directly to Giulietti, Donovan said.

To better guard against broken rail joints like the one that caused the Bridgeport accident, the railroad put together a database of the joints, which eventually are removed as welders fuse tracks together in continuous rails.

Metro-North chief engineer Robert Puciloski told the NTSB last November that a supervisor responsible for rail in Bridgeport may not have known about the previous problem.

"The supervisor in charge had only been there for a month, so he probably didn't know that history," Puciloski said at the hearing. "He didn't have that memory."

He said then that the railroad was putting together the database. Donovan said this week that it has been created.