Rail-traffic control staff at the Metro-North Railroad had been working seven days straight for “weeks on end” because of a manpower shortage during a period when the nation’s second-largest commuter railroad was vexed by five accidents.
These are the staffers who orchestrate commuter-train movements. Their job — at minimum — is to ensure trains don’t run into each other, or run over a Metro-North employee working along the tracks.
It’s exactly “the wrong place” to have fatigued employees, MTA Chairman Tom Prendergast said in an interview conducted by federal safety experts in March. “You overload them and they’ll make a bad decision.”
The manpower shortage in such a safety-critical area is just one of the shocking revelations that can be found in a 75-page transcript of an interview with Prendergast by the National Transportation Safety Board.
The NTSB was then investigating a series of five major Metro-North accidents that took place in less than one year, including the December derailment in the Bronx that killed four passengers.
Technically, the investigations are still open, but the root cause is clear. This was a poorly managed MTA railroad without proper and aggressive focus on everything from inspections and maintenance to training and even staffing levels.
Prendergast himself expressed disbelief at the depth of the weaknesses. He was chairman only five months when the first accident, a derailment in Bridgeport, Conn., occurred in May 2013. The last — a track worker hit by a train in Harlem — occurred in March.
“The decay was a lot worse than you would have expected it to be,” he said, apparently referring to both the physical condition of the tracks and quality of management.
Other shocking revelations:
* Rail-traffic controllers complained about not being properly prepared. They didn’t receive any training, for example, on a simulator that would mimic situations they’d confront in the control center—even though Metro-North apparently had such a device. “It’s like … ‘just get in the seat and learn,’ which they felt was just baptism by fire,” an investigator said.
* Supervisors of track gangs and other crews in the field were working six and seven days straight because of shortages in their ranks, resulting in perilous fatigue.
* Metro-North doesn’t have its own track-geometry car, which uses modern technology to scan and measure tracks for defects. “How can the second-largest railroad in the country not have a track-geometry car when New York City Transit has four or five and Long Island’s got one or two? I just don’t know,” Prendergast said.
* Management wasn’t “staying on top of inspections” and making sure permanent repairs to rails were getting done, Prendergast said. There was no systematic tracking of defects to identify dangerous trends. And there’s a hodgepodge of six different types of rails, which Prendergast said “is impossible to maintain.”
* Former Metro-North President Howard Permut, a career planner, didn’t have a nuts-and-bolts background in track maintenance and operations, and didn’t have top-shelf chiefs overseeing those areas to fill the void. “And that’s where it fell apart,” Prendergast said.
Metro-North, under belated federal pressure, has begun a sweeping overhaul of its operations.
But knowing what we know now, it’s not surprising that there were five accidents, killing six and injuring about 130 others. It’s surprising there weren’t more.
