Evidence that Amtrak workers failed to connect properly th air brakes of four locomotives that crashed into a Conrail freight train near Chase on Friday turned the investigation yesterday to Amtrak's rail yard near Washington's Union Station.
Alan Pollock, of the National Transportation Safety Board, said investigators will begin questioning this week the workers at Washington's Ivy City Yards who prepared the train -- a diesel locomotive hauling three idle electric engines -- for the trip to Philadelphia for maintenance.
The massive locomotives, their brakes screeching, slid past at least one red signal and slammed into the 64th car of a 125-car Conrail coal train about 3:09 a.m. Friday, investigators said. The crash occurred as the Conrail train was crossing the locomotives' path at a switch just south of the Gunpowder River.
That switch is about 100 yards from the site of an eerily similar accident -- the 1987 wreck of the Amtrak Colonial, which rear-ended a Conrail train that blundered onto its path. Sixteen people were killed and at least 170 injured.
The Amtrak locomotives were not pulling any passenger cars Friday. The only injuries were to the Amtrak engineer, Ray Francis Hunsberger, 38, and the conductor, Ronald Edward Hairston, 48, both of Pennsylvania.
They were listed in fair and stable condition at the Maryland Shock Trauma Center in Baltimore yesterday afternoon.
Amtrak service between Wilmington and Baltimore, halted for more than 12 hours Friday, resumed its regular schedule after 11 a.m. yesterday when two of four closed tracks were reopened, said a spokesman for the passenger rail agency said. The other two tracks, used mostly by freight trains, were expected to reopen late last night.
James E. Burnett Jr., a member of the five-member safety board who is leading the investigation, told reporters at a news conference Friday night that the air brakes on the three "dead in tow" electric locomotives had been improperly linked to the air brakes of the operating diesel.
Because none of the three electric locomotives was running, none was pumping air into the reserve tank for its air brake system, he said. A lever on each of the electric locomotives, he said, should have been turned from horizontal to vertical to permit the diesel engine to replenish the electric locomotives' reserve air tanks.
But investigators at the crash site found all three levers set in the horizontal position -- cutting off air to the reserve tank.
