Las Posas Road, Camarillo, CA - An Ongoing Rail Crossing Deathtrap - 2015

 

Las Posas Road, Camarillo, CA - An Ongoing Rail Crossing Deathtrap

On February 23, 2015, a Metrolink passenger train struck a Ford F-450 work truck and trailer at the intersection of Fifth St. and Rice Ave. near Oxnard, California. Scores of passengers were injured and one week later, Senior Engineer Glenn Steele succumbed to his injuries. Dismayed by the number of recent rail collisions at that site, I researched and wrote about that grade crossing and its many safety deficiencies. Later, I created a website that featured both problems and solutions for that troubled location at www.5thandrice.com.

U.S. Representative Julia Brownley (D-Agoura Hills) has taken a special interest in the 5th & Rice Grade crossing. Recently, through her staff, she contacted Mr. Marc Gerstel, a person injured in the February 2015 collision. Brownley’s office told Gerstel that the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) would soon visit the site and conduct a safety evaluation at the Fifth and Rice grade crossing. If so, that would be the first substantive action taken by any public agency or corporation involved with the operation and safety of that deadly grade crossing.

The Fifth and Rice grade crossing in Oxnard is both the busiest and the most hazardous commercial rail crossing in Ventura County. In the past decade, it has produced more rail related deaths and injuries than any other crossing in the county. Even so, two grade crossings in nearby Camarillo now vie for the title of “deadliest rail crossing in Ventura County”.

At 5:50 AM on August 24, 2012, between Pleasant Valley Road and Las Posas Road, a Metrolink passenger train bound for Los Angeles struck a semi-truck and trailer that had slowed to make a turn into a nearby farm field. In that collision, both the truck driver and his passenger sustained non-fatal injuries.

On December 30, 2013 at 10:49 AM, as an Amtrak train was passing by, a car entered the grade crossing at Fifth Street and Las Posas Road. The resulting collision sent the car into the side of a railroad service truck, which was standing nearby. The driver of the first vehicle died at the scene and the railroad service worker received injuries resulting from the accident.

On January 24, 2014 at 10:30 AM, crews responded to a train collision at Fifth Street and Las Posas Road in Camarillo. At that grade crossing, a seventy-seven year old woman drove her minivan into the side of a passing Amtrak train. The driver, identified as Misty Jill Wood succumbed to her injuries at the scene. A Union Pacific Railroad worker in a nearby truck received moderate injuries. There were no injuries among the passengers on the northbound Amtrak Pacific Surfliner train.

On the evening of March 1, 2015, less than two weeks after the Oxnard Metrolink collision, a passenger vehicle stopped on the tracks at Fifth Street and Pleasant Valley Road in Camarillo. Moments after the two occupants of the passenger car exited the vehicle; an Amtrak passenger train heading for Los Angeles struck and sent the mangled vehicle into a nearby ditch. No injuries resulted from the collision.

At 8:25 AM on April 23, 2015, less than two months after the Oxnard Metrolink collision, a Union Pacific freight train collided with a white Ford Explorer at the intersection of Fifth Street and Las Posas Road in Camarillo. Driver Timothy Newhouse, a fifty-seven year old man from Rialto, California drove through the crossing gate arm and into the side of the freight train. According to officers called to the scene, the vehicle rolled three or four times before coming to a rest in a nearby ditch. The driver succumbed to his injuries at the scene. There were no other injuries.

At 2:05 PM on September 21, 2015, a pedestrian stepped on to the tracks near Fifth Street and Pleasant Valley Road in Camarillo. Moments later, a moving Amtrak train struck and killed that pedestrian. The incident appeared to be a suicide, but detectives responded to investigate. There was little else reported about that deadly incident.

At 10:30 AM on November 21, 2015, the latest in a string of deadly train collisions occurred at the Fifth Street and Las Posas Road grade crossing in Camarillo. According to the California Highway Patrol, at the time of the collision, the crossing gate arm was down and the safety lights were flashing. For unknown reasons, Mr. Brian Kuczynski, twenty-three, of Camarillo drove his car through the crossing gate and into the side of a moving Amtrak train. After Kuczynski's car hit the crossing arm and moving train, it travelled 171 feet and into a nearby ditch. Flown by helicopter to Los Robles Hospital & Medical Center in Thousand Oaks with major injuries Kuczynski later died. There were no other injuries.

The infamous Fifth Street and Rice Avenue grade crossing in Oxnard still holds the record in Ventura County. In that regard, it is the worst of the worst throughout the Oxnard Plain. Still, in little more than the past three years, seven train collisions at either Pleasant Valley Road or Las Posas Road grade crossings resulted in five deaths and four injuries. If this pace continues, we can expect an average of two additional fatalities at the Las Posas and Pleasant Valley rail crossings each year.

Assuming that only the pedestrian fatality at Pleasant Valley Road was a suicide, why have so many motorists collided with moving trains at those two crossings? It is easy enough to pass off these collisions to inattentive or distracted drivers. With mobile telephones, voice activated apps, GPS navigation systems and sound-deadening insulation in our vehicles; it is easy to become self-absorbed and inattentive to unexpected safety threats. When driving across the Oxnard Plain, verdant strawberry and vegetable fields, light traffic and hazy morning sunshine can lull a motorist into a false sense of security.

The Federal Railroad Administration (FAR) sets the minimum standards for railroad grade crossings. The minimum requirements include a “crossbuck”, which is a large “X” shaped sign that reads “Railroad – Crossing”, at least two flashing red lights adjacent to the crossbuck and appropriate painted safety lines in the roadway. This configuration applies to both directions of travel. At the Fifth and Rice crossing, there is an additional red warning signal. It resides on a horizontal strut that extends from the crossbuck mast over one lane of southbound Rice Ave. traffic. Additionally, automatic gates descend to block the roadway whenever a train approaches. As such, all three of the grade crossings in question meet only the 1986 minimum federal standards for “active traffic control devices” at multi-lane grade crossings.

Although revised in 2007, the bulk of the Federal Highway Administration’s “Railroad-Highway Grade Crossing Handbook” derives from the 1986 version of that document. In essence, “active traffic control devices” have changed little in the past thirty years. In the 1986 update, the Federal Highway Administration responded to rapid urbanization and concomitant increases in both vehicular and train traffic across the country. Until that time, passive warning systems were the norm.

Beginning with the 1986 standards, there was an attempt to update warning light systems beyond the legacy systems still utilized in many rural and urban locations. Looking back at the history of warning lights, the first active warning system consisted of a railroad worker swinging a red lantern back and forth to warn motorists of an approaching train. Later railroad safety engineers introduced the “wig wag”, which featured a pendulum arm that contained a red warning light. As a train approached, the lighted wig wag signal swung back and forth. In doing so, the wig wag mimicked a railroad worker's lantern swinging at arm's length.

 

Watch as old Southern Pacific Locomotive No. 3100
departs the station at Orange Empire Railroad Museum.

The major improvement in 1986 was to require two red warning lights that flashed in sequence. The timing of the flashes mimicked both a wig wag and the railroad lantern of old. Despite the advent of light emitting diodes (LEDs), most flashing light signals still utilize low wattage bulbs, varying from 16 to 36 watts. Even with reflectors behind the low wattage bulbs, a light within the dark red glass of the “roundel” can be difficult to see during daylight hours. Over eight percent of men experience color blindness in the red spectrum. That means that almost one man in twelve might see a flashing signal light, but not detect it as a red warning light.

The automated safety gates found at “active traffic control grade crossings” create another area of concern. Designed to activate not more than three seconds after the safety warning lights begin to flash, the motorized gates take time to arrive at their “down position”. So long as the gates are down prior to the arrival of a moving train, they meet legal requirements. Regardless of a gate length of up to thirty-eight feet, only three red lights are required to meet federal standards. The red light at the tip of the gate arm burns steadily, while the other two flash alternately.

If we were to recreate a mid-morning scene of a typical Las Posas Road train collision, here is what the errant driver might see. Approaching the tracks from the north, the morning sun would be coming in the driver’s side window, possibly dazzling his or her eyes. As the train approaches at full speed, it might appear as a dot on the horizon or not be visible at all. Whether distracted, speeding or fully attentive, the driver may or may not see the two low-wattage red warning lights flashing in their roundels. Likewise, the driver may not see the slender gate arm descend from vertical to its horizontal (closed) position. By the time the driver notices the flashing lights, the safety gate and the train, it may too late to avoid a catastrophic collision.

Much has changed since enactment of the 1986 grade crossing standards. Our driving experience now includes cup holders, mobile telephones, integrated information and entertainment systems, and texting while driving. The result is a quantum leap in potential distractions available to drivers today. The attitude of many who comment on relevant websites is “drivers beware”. If you drive into the side of a moving train, it is probably your fault, they write. Your own death or dismemberment, they say, proves their point. In reality, the FRA minimum standard developed for grade crossings in 1986 are often insufficient to warn motorists of impending collisions with moving trains.

With five of the recent train collisions at Las Posas Road and Fifth Street happening between 8:30 AM and 2:30 PM, further assessment of both natural light and traffic control signal lighting is in order. With Fifth Street creating a buffer for northbound vehicular traffic, almost all of the Las Posas Road train collisions involve southbound vehicular traffic. From morning until midafternoon, the sun may interfere with the driver’s ability to see the obsolete warning signals and other faded safety markings at Las Posas Rd., Pleasant Valley Rd. and Rice Ave. grade crossings.

Perhaps the pending CPUC investigation of the Rice Avenue grade crossing will give impetus Sealed Corridor traffic safety features at the three most deadly railroad grade crossings in Ventura County. In the interest of safety for all who travel the Oxnard Plain in motor vehicles and passenger trains, I hope so.

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By James McGillis at 05:12 PM | Railroad Safety | Comments (0) | Link

Metrolink to Spend $338 Million on New Locomotives, but Little for Passenger Safety - 2015

 

Metrolink to Spend $338 Million on New Locomotives, but Little for Passenger Safety

According to the Los Angeles Times “engines of change” article, Metrolink plans to spend $200 million on twenty-nine new “Tier 4” locomotives from Electro-Motive, a Caterpillar, Inc. subsidiary. That means each new engine will cost almost $6.9 million. Options on another twenty new Tier 4 locomotives will push that replacement scheme to a total of almost $338 million. Using exhaust gas re-circulation technologies, engines on Tier 4 locomotives are designed to lower both nitrogen oxide and particulates in their exhaust stream. Since Metrolink will be the first passenger rail system in the country to operate Tier 4 locomotives, both reliability and fuel economy remain in question.

As of 2012, Metrolink had 137 Bombardier cab-cars and coaches in its operational fleet. In 2013, Metrolink spent $263 million to replace what it said was “substantially all” of its obsolete Bombardier bi-level coaches. The actual purchase included a mix 137 new Hyundai-Rotem cab-cars and coaches, for an average price of $1.9 million each.

As early as 2005, Metrolink admitted that, “fixed worktables” in Bombardier bi-level coaches “added to injuries” in a Glendale collision that year. Of the eleven deaths in that collision, no one knows how many died because of impact with fixed worktables. In 2005, a Metrolink spokesperson said, "We are not going to start ripping out the old tables tomorrow". In the 2008 Metrolink Chatsworth collision, more than one passenger died as a result of abdominal or thoracic impact with a fixed worktable. Despite death and near dismemberment in Chatsworth, Metrolink never did retrofit those coaches with safer worktables, nor did they cordon them off from passenger use.

The 2013 purchase of 137 new Hyundai-Rotem coaches with padded, frangible tables was supposed to solve the “killer table” problem that Metrolink had previously swept under the rug. Despite their average of over one million miles traveled, Metrolink did not retire all of their obsolete Bombardier bi-level coaches. Instead, in many of their current trains, Metrolink intersperses Bombardier coaches with incompatible Hyundai-Rotem coaches. The Hyundai-Rotem coaches employ crash energy management (CEM) technology, while the Bombardier coaches are inelastic and prone to decoupling in a collision.

The National Transportation Safety Board has not yet published its final report regarding the February 2015 Oxnard Metrolink collision, which took the life of Metrolink engineer Glenn Steele, and injured twenty-eight. When it does, it is likely to find that the obsolete Bombardier bi-level coach riding in the second position was a major contributing factor to the decoupling and derailment of all five cars in that train.

If Metrolink replaced “substantially all” of its obsolete Bombardier bi-level coaches, why was Metrolink passenger Marc Gerstel riding across the Oxnard Plain in that ill-fated Metrolink train? In the Oxnard Metrolink collision, why was he tumbled against several “killer worktables” in a coach that should have been retired years ago? Apparently, in Metrolink-speak, “substantially all” is not the same as “all”. It is time for Metrolink to go public on this issue and scrap all Bombardier bi-level coaches still remaining in their operating fleet.

In early 2014, Metrolink quietly began selling off their excess fleet of Bombardier bi-level coaches with “killer worktables” still installed. If Metrolink-surplus Bombardier bi-level coaches should experience a collision, unsuspecting Caltrain passengers heading to or from Silicon City (San Francisco) may soon subject themselves to severed bodies. Did Metrolink disclose the unsafe worktables to Caltrain prior to purchase or did both agencies ignore their fiduciary and legal responsibilities?

In 2012, Metrolink considered Bombardier bi-level coaches with more than one million miles of service to be functionally obsolete. If those coaches were obsolete in Southern California, why are they acceptable for service in Northern California? As P.T Barnum said, "There's a sucker born every minute".

For the whole story regarding Metrolink's passenger safety issues, please visit our website, 5thandRice.com.

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By James McGillis at 03:22 PM | | Comments (0) | Link

Ventura County - Remains in the Steam Era of Transportation Infrastructure and Railroad Safety - 2015

Ventura County - Remains in the Steam Era of Transportation Infrastructure and Railroad Safety

In February 2015, the grade crossing at Rice Ave. and Fifth St. (Fifth and Rice) in Oxnard, California was the scene of yet another deadly Metrolink train collision. While reading news reports of the collision, I found myself appalled by the continued carnage at the busiest commercial intersection in Ventura County.

Beginning in April 2015, I set out to investigate the circumstances of the collision between Metrolink Train No. 102 and a Ford F-450 work truck. Since then, I have published my own preliminary findings concerning the deficiencies at the intersection and within the Metrolink trains that traverse the Oxnard Plain.

As of this writing, it has been five months since the Oxnard Metrolink collision. In the interim, politicians and transportation agency chiefs from throughout Southern California have agreed that the intersection represents an ongoing danger to motorists and train passengers alike. Most officials pointed to the 2004 election loss of a Ventura County half-cent transportation sales tax as the root of the problem.

Without matching funds from a county sales tax, neither state nor federal money will soon be forthcoming to fix safety issues at that serial-collision site. Experts and policymakers agree that only a complete grade separation, utilizing a Rice Ave. overpass will eliminate future collisions at the site. With a $35 - $40 million price tag for the grade separation, no one in authority expects any substantial safety improvements at the collision site for at least the next decade.

In early 2015, Metrolink named transportation veteran Art Leahy as its new chief executive. On June 30, 2015, L.A. Times reporter Dan Weikel interviewed Leahy regarding the important issues facing both Leahy and Metrolink. One of those issues was the grade crossing at Fifth and Rice. Weikel asked, “Is anything being done about Rice Avenue near Oxnard, where a Metrolink train collided with a pickup truck and trailer that strayed into the crossing?”

Apparently, neither Weikel nor Leahy understood that a Ford F-450 is not a lightweight pickup truck or that its attached trailer was transporting heavy welding equipment. In fact, an F-450 weighs over seven tons and can tow a trailer weighing over fifteen tons. If the F-450 rig was fully loaded, it could have weighed more than 44,000 pounds. Nor did the truck “stray into the crossing”. Instead, its driver, Jose Sanchez-Ramirez, from Tucson Arizona, had prematurely made a hard right turn onto the tracks. Eighty feet west of the intersection, his truck and trailer had halted on the tracks in a “high-centered” position.

In answering the reporter’s question, Leahy began by reiterating the usual Ventura County “tax and funding” issues. Then, Leahy displayed his ignorance of what had happened in the predawn hours on that fateful February morning. By his answer, it was obvious that Leahy had bought into the assumption that the F-450 rig was a pickup truck that had “strayed into the crossing”. With that in mind, Leahy made his pitch for modest, yet superfluous safety improvements at the deadly crossing.

Leahy stated, “I would like to look into putting sensors in the pavement. It’s cheaper and faster to do than a grade separation”. Had Leahy read the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) preliminary accident report, he would have known that sensors in the pavement would not have detected a truck and trailer stalled eighty feet from the grade crossing. Nothing that Leahy suggested would have helped prevent the February 2015 collision of Train No. 102.

If he wants to know what happened at Fifth and Rice, Leahy should conduct his own site survey. In fact, it might be instructive for Leahy to ride the Metrolink Ventura County line to Ventura one afternoon and then take Train No. 102 back to Los Angeles the next morning.  As he approaches Fifth and Rice, I hope he is not seated at a killer worktable in an obsolete bi-level Bombardier coach. If so, in the event of a collision, he would have a high risk of debilitating injuries or even death. Doubting that such a busy person as Leahy would visit a former crash site so far from his home base in Los Angeles, I decided to survey the scene again, nearly six months after the deadly collision.

Soon after I published two articles about Metrolink and rail safety in Ventura County, I met Mr. Marc Gerstel. On that dark February morning, Gerstel told me, he was a passenger on Train No. 102. According to news reports that day, "the train was traveling at 79 mph headed out of the Oxnard Transit Center". While sitting in the second coach, Gerstel heard the brakes engage in full emergency mode. As his laptop computer flew across the worktable at which he sat, he felt the collision, saw a fireball outside the window and then began to “tumble like a tennis shoe in a dryer”. People and objects were flying everywhere inside the obsolete bi-level Bombardier coach in which he rode. After he struck one or more of what Metrolink has admitted for over a decade to be “killer worktables”, Gerstel sustained both a broken neck and shattered lower vertebrae.

In early July, when I asked Marc Gerstel if he would like to visit the scene of his recent, near-death experience, he said that he was ready. Regular readers of this blog know that I have two characters that accompany me on some of my fieldwork. They are Plush Kokopelli and Coney the Traffic Cone. As Coney likes to say, “Coney is my name and safety is my game”. Plush Kokopelli says nothing, as he is mute. Once Gerstel saw my dynamic duo, he was glad to have them along. Perhaps their whimsical presence softened the hard realities that he had so recently experienced during the train collision.

After parking in a safe location, Gerstel and I agreed that we would complete our observations from the relative safety of the public sidewalk that runs alongside Rice Ave. From there, we could observe and photograph much of what truck driver Jose Sanchez-Ramirez might have seen, or not seen in the early morning darkness of February 24, 2015.

Upon arriving at the scene, my first impression was that nothing had changed since my visit three months earlier. To the east, there was a gaping hole where engineer Glenn Steele watched as his cab-control car No. 645 whipped violently around and demolished a cinder block and wrought iron wall. Railroad ties, splintered by the steel wheels of the derailed Train No. 102 still supported the railroad tracks to either side of the crossing. At the crossing, a concrete and steel platform lay between the rails. While standing on its edge, where the platform meets the sidewalk, I could feel a rumble each time a vehicle passed by. Had the impact of steel train wheels loosened that platform from its moorings?

For Marc Gerstel, going back so soon to the scene of the collision was an emotional experience. On a grassy knoll, in the shade of a tree, he found a small memorial to the engineer, Glenn Steele. Atop the memorial was a replica of a U.S. postage stamp, “Honoring Railroad Engineers of America”. In Memoriam. Glenn Steele – Metrolink’s No. 1 Locomotive Engineer, who passed away in the line of duty, March 2015. “The people knew by the whistle’s moan That the man at the throttle was Casey Jones.” – Ballad of Casey Jones. After a moment of silence, Marc Gerstel said to me, “He could have run to safety, but he stayed in the cab, riding the brakes. I believe he saved my life”. As of this writing, interested readers may make a contribution to the family of Glenn Steele at a memorial website in his honor.

Sadly, rail crossing infrastructure deficiencies and an unsafe train configuration took the life of Metrolink engineer Glenn Steele. Since the Metrolink Oxnard collision, no one in any corporation, legislative body or government agency has moved to mitigate the unsafe conditions still present at the Fifth and Rice grade crossing. In fact, since workers removed the wreckage from the tracks, nothing except the addition of a memorial to engineer Glenn Steele has changed at the collision site. To the untutored eye, Fifth and Rice looks like a typical railroad grade crossing in Ventura County. To the cognoscenti, it is a patchwork of neglect, quick fixes and glaring danger. Although the use of bailing wire is not evident at the collision site, there is plenty of exposed electrical tape keeping the warning signals alive.

Each day, officials at the City of Oxnard, Ventura County, Union Pacific Railroad, Amtrak, Metrolink and regional rail authority LOSSAN hold their collective breath, hoping that history will not repeat itself at Fifth and Rice. In their collective inaction, they play a game of Russian roulette with the thousands of vehicle occupants and train passengers that cross there each day. Bureaucratic thinking and institutional inertia rule the day. Like a yachtsman who yells, “Tonnage” as he careens closer to a smaller boat, the big iron of the railroad rules the grade crossing at Fifth and Rice. After dreaming about their own collision with a Ford F-450 at that site, do the politicians, bureaucrats and agency executives awaken to the sound of a train whistle, howling in the night? If not, perhaps they should.

This is Part 1 of a two-part article. To read Part 2, please click HERE.

To read all of our Ventura County railroad safety articles in one place, please visit 5thandRice.com.

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By James McGillis at 10:48 PM | | Comments (0) | Link