Lawmakers Grill Amtrak and Federal Officials About Philadelphia Derailment Safety Issues
By Pat Loeb, Walt Hunter
WASHINGTON, D.C. (CBS) -- A House committee today was questioning Amtrak and federal officials about last month's fatal train derailment in Philadelphia.
As so often happens with these hearings, there has been less revelation about the accident than about where committee members stand on various issues: in this case, two big issues are the investment Congress has made in Amtrak and the efficacy of seat belts on trains.
There has been some back-and-forth in this hearing before the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee over whether fully funding Amtrak's budget requests would have allowed it to more quickly install "positive train controls," which advocates say would have prevented the derailment.
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One thing all the witnesses seem to agree on is that positive train control, which slows trains automatically at dangerous curves, would have prevented this crash. Amtrak chairman Joseph Boardman assured the committee that installation of PTC by the December 31st Congressionally-mandated deadline will happen.
He said, "The notion that an engineer might speed into a curve was just not anticipated."
On the topic of seat belts, Sarah Feinberg, the head of the Federal Railroad Administration, said that there is a downside to seat belts because all the seats would have to be "hardened" to take belts and, because people walk around more on trains than on planes or in cars, there could be more injuries caused by hard seats in the event of an accident than would be prevented by the installation of seat belts.
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