Metro Collision, Washington DC

[naraht]

The screw from the NTSB that studied the accident indicated that the Metro Driver's Cell phone was in her backpack, which is a perfectly acceptable place to have it according to the regulations.

The NTSB ran a test train to the location of the stopped train and the sensors in the track did not properly transmit that to the central computers. The moving train was running on automatic, which at that point the computer will run the train between 55 and 59 miles per hour. With the stopped train being invisible to the central computers, the computers would have not had any reason to reduce speed. The stopped train was around a slight curve, so it wouldn't have been seen a very long distance down the track. The moving train had both the manual and emergency brakes put on before the crash.

It is entirely possible that the driver of the moving train did everything that she was trained to do, and it still wasn't enough.

There are also issues that the paired cars in the front of the train were in the 1000 series (the cars that metro bought when the first started the system in the mid 1970s).