Could Tech Have Thwarted Pennsylvania Train Derailment?

It’s still very early in the investigation into the train derailment in eastern Pennsylvania Saturday morning that involved three trains and left two railroad cars partly under the surface of the Lehigh River.

The cars included no hazardous materials, according to Northampton County Executive Lamont McClure, but diesel fuel from at least one of the Norfolk Southern train engines spilled into the river.

For the most part, McClure wanted to reserve judgement until the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) conducted its investigation, but he said the locals were both lucky and prepared.

“In terms of a derailment, this is probably your best-case scenario,” McClure said of the tankers being empty or near empty. “However, I’m very unhappy that even 50 gallons of diesel spilled into the Lehigh River — that is not a good thing.”

Initial reports indicated that one train was stopped and another rear-ended it, which sent debris onto one other track and into the path of a third oncoming train. It’s unclear whether Positive Train Control (PTC), a technology that is deployed on tracks to prevent such accidents, was in play.

“We’ve seen accidents like this occur in the past, and fortunately there was no hazmat being transported, but these are the kinds of accidents that PTC can stop and prohibit from happening,” said Bob Chipkevich, a former director of railroad, pipeline and hazardous materials investigations at NTSB.

Chipkevich has long been an advocate of PTC and is finally seeing some on tracks around the country. “It’s been on the NTSB radar now for 20 or 30 years and slowly, it’s being pushed out over tracks that are transporting large quantities of hazardous materials and passenger trains.”

Keith Holloway, a media relations specialist with NTSB, said the investigation was just getting underway and that part of that will be to determine if the track was equipped with PTC and whether it would have or should have prevented the accident.

“We are launching an investigation into finding out what happened, why it happened and hopefully, to prevent it from happening again,” Holloway said. “Depending on the type of accident this was and whether [PTC] would have made a difference.”

McClure said that his Emergency Management Department has worked with Norfolk Southern, and in fact the entities collaborated on several trainings last year. Part of the regular mitigation training for first responders includes train derailment and hazmat training, but McClure said he ordered three enhanced derailment trainings last year because of the Norfolk Southern freight train that derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, in February 2023 that caught fire with toxic chemicals onboard.

“To their credit, Norfolk Southern participated in two of the three enhanced derailment trainings that we had last year, so after Palestine, I ordered my emergency management folks to intensify train derailment mitigation training,” McClure said.

He also said he would be using this derailment to further train first responders. “I absolutely think our response was improved by the fact that we had those additional trainings,” McClure said. “We’re going to use this to intensify our training because, right now, we can’t really rely on Norfolk Southern to keep their trains on their tracks.”