Amtrak workers apparently failed to properly hook up the brakes on the string of four locomotives that crashed into a Conrail freight train in eastern Baltimore County yesterday morning, the chief federal investigator said last night.
Jim Burnett, a member of the National Transportation Safety Board who is leading the investigation of the crash, said that only the brakes on the lead, diesel locomotive were working.
Someone apparently failed to properly connect the diesel's air compression brake system to that of three electric locomotives it was towing, he said.
Since the electric locomotives, which were not pulling any passenger cars, were "dead in tow" and not operating, they were not charging their own air brake systems -- and wound up creating a huge dead weight that the diesel alone could not stop.
Mr. Burnett said the crew members saw but could not obey a stop signal as they approached a switch near the Gunpowder River.
A 125-car coal train, headed from Harrisburg, Pa., to Baltimore's Bayview rail yard, was passing through the switch about 3:10 a.m. yesterday. The Amtrak locomotives were unable to stop and slammed into the middle of the coal train.
The crash site was about 100 yards north of the spot where in 1987 the Amtrak Colonial passenger train collided with a freight train, killing 16 and injuring more than 170.
Mr. Burnett said the brakes on the locomotives involved in yesterday's crash should have been hooked up.
The Amtrak train "was not designed to operate the way it was," he told reporters at a news conference in a Baltimore County hotel last night.
Tape recordings of the accident, summarized by Mr. Burnett, suggested the brakes were locked for about a minute and a half before the crash.
On one tape, Mr. Burnett said, the Amtrak conductor was heard shouting to the engineer seconds before the accident: "Are we going to crash, Ray? Are we going to crash?"
"We're going to hit it," the engineer radioed dispatchers a short time later.
Both crewmen aboard the Amtrak locomotives leapt for their lives and survived. They were the only people hurt in the collision.
Asked if the failure to connect the brakes triggered the accident, Mr. Burnett noted that under NTSB rules he could not comment on the cause of the crash. But he added, "The answer is pretty obvious."
An Amtrak spokesman earlier said it was "a bizarre coincidence" that yesterday's crash occurred within 100 yards of the site of the worst crash in Amtrak history.
