Commuter railroads

Infrequent users of commuter railroads, and most users of Amtrak will not have this wealth of experience. These passengers will therefore have to form some perception of the safety offered by railroads. Chapter 5 discussed how people form perceptions of risk. Spectacular derailments and collisions are low probability events which attract substantial press reporting. The primary and secondary biases... 

Employee fatalities and injuries per million employee hours are shown in figure 20.2. The Class I railroads have the lowest rate at 9.5 fatalities and injuries per million employee hours. Class II freight railroads have injury rates about seventy percent higher than the Class I railroads. In general the injury rates for the various Class II railroads are closely grouped around the mean with no railroad having an injury rate of more than twice the mean. Commuter railroads have an injury rate two-and-a-half times that of the Class I railroads. 

Railroad steam has gone the way of the paddlewheel, replaced on the nation s commuter and cross-country railways by diesel oil and electricity. For decades, railways themselves have been in decline. Intercity passenger travel is dominated by the automobile and the plane. The truck is king of the road for freight hauling. Speed and convenience are the obsessions that have forced the train off to a siding, if not off the track altogether. 

At speeds of about 120 miles per hour and greater, there is significant wear on both wheels and rails. Federal Railroad Administration standards for conventional freight trains and commuter trains allow relatively large discrepancies between the level of one rail and another—1.25 inches for 80 mph operations. However, the FRA standard drops to 0.5 inches [sic] for 120 mph operations. By comparison, the French TGV standard is 0.16 for the 170 mph portions of the system. Satisfying the standards for high-speed service is not impossible, but it is very expensive. 

C) the National Railroad Passenger Corporation, and any commuter authority (as defined in section 103(8) of the Rail Passenger Service Act). 

Corporate culture issues also appear to have played a part in the increased risk associated with some new entrants to the airline industry for example, Gray (1987, pg. 34) stated that Many new carriers have little notion of or experience in how an airline must be run. By contrast, corporate culture issues did not appear to pose as much risk in the new spin-off railroads established after rail industry deregulation, in part because they were largely staffed by experienced personnel from the larger railroads. In addition, because of intercormections between the new short-line railroads and the major rail carriers, the smaller railroads were generally required to meet certain minimal levels of safety performance. Similarly, the recent trend toward partnerships between the commuter air carriers and the major airlines may be associated with a reduction in the average risk of the commuter carriers. 

NTSB. 1973. Collision of Illinois Central Gulf Railroad commuter trains. Report No. RAR-73-05. National Transportation Safety Board, Washington, D.C. 

First-hand experience can improve the information for some groups of passengers. About sixty percent of national passengers miles are by commutation passengers (FRA, 1997a). Regular commuters will board trains almost 500 times a year and hence can absorb a considerable information that might indicate the amount of preventive effort undertaken by the railroad. 

Of course, even a low level of preventive effort by a railroad will not mean that an accident occurs during every trip. A regular commuter will go many years, or even decades, before they are involved in an accident. (In the event that the commuter suffers a fatal injury, this new information may come too late to affect their travel-demand behavior ) Nevertheless, accident probabilities may be inferred from more readily observable attributes of service such as operating practices, minor operating problems, the condition of equipment, on-time performance, and the demeanor of employees. 

Among the Class II commuter passenger railroads the Long Island Railroad had an increasing number of collisions and derailments and increased employee casualties were at the Northeast Illinois, Northern Indiana, and Southeastern Pennsylvania systems. 

Trunk Western and the Soo Line have higher than predicted employee casualties. Among the Class II freight railroads the Alaska, Bangor and Aroostook Chicago, Central and Pacific Dakota, Minnesota and Eastern Indiana Harbor Belt Paducah and Louisville and the Wisconsin Central have statistically-significant elevated employee casualties. The same is also true of the Northern Indiana, Port Authority Trans Hudson, and Southeastern Pennsylvania commuter passenger systems. 

Floor structures of limited express type, suburban, for commuting, nongovernmental railroad, and subway electric railcars are shown in O Fig. 47.7b. In them, floor compound material made of epoxy resin and lightweight aggregate is plastered and cured on steel deck, and PVC floor coverings are bonded on the surface of it with nitrile adhesives. 

Steel deck Limited express type, suburban, for commuting, nongovernmental b railroad, and subway electric railcars... 

Metrolink Crash. The Los Angeles eommuter railroad Metrolink entered into a 200 million settlement with victims of a collision between a freight train and a commuter train that occurred while the engineer was busily texting messages to admirers. At the time, FRA did not prohibit such texting. ... 

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