Amtrak engineer was new to Northeast corridor
CBS News has learned Engineer Brandon Bostian had only been working on the Northeast Corridor for fewer than three weeks. An NTSB spokesman tells says "it was two weeks, give or take a few days."
On Friday, NTSB Boardmember Robert Sumwalt described Bostian's experience as "a few weeks" a fact that went largely unnoticed due to the windshield news.
While investigators have not definitively ruled out mechanical failure, a focus of the investigation is on the train operator and his actions in the locomotive in the moments leading up to the derailment -- his relative lack of experience on the line and how that played in is also to be examined in the coming weeks.
Also Tuesday, the union representing railroad employees blasted congress and Amtrak for a federal mandate requiring just one engineer in the cab of a trains on the Northeast Corridor. Congress passed a law reducing the required number of operators from 2 to 1 in the early 1980s, the union says.