A week before Christmas, the Amtrak derailment left three dead, 70 hurt and countless questions.
“No one at this point really knows what the cause was,” said House Transportation Chair Judy Clibborn as she opened the first legislative hearing on the accident.
The southbound Amtrak Cascades flew off a tight curve near Dupont. The NTSB says it was traveling 78 miles an hour, even though it passed a speed limit sign that said it should not have been going faster than 30 miles an hour.
That why many of the questions from lawmakers focused on why the new run was launched without positive train control, a system that would have automatically slowed the train.
Officials responded that there was no deadline to begin service in order to keep millions in federal grants.
“The deadlines that were in place were deadlines for constructing the project. There was no deadline for initiating service,” said Washington State Transportation Secretary Roger Millar.
Millar pointed out that positive train control was in the process of being installed when the new run was launched, but that the Amtrak Cascades had safely served more than 14 million passengers over the years without it.
Amtrak Government Affairs Senior Manager Rob Eaton said the corporation has for the first time appointed an executive vice president to be its chief safety officer, reporting directly to the CEO.
Officials promised that all Amtrak Cascade trains will be using positive train control by September of this year.
“One of the things about tragedies like this is that you learn from them. I think that we are learning some things to make sure that it never happens again,” said Millar.
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