Why Train Travel in U.S. Has Never Been a Smooth Ride

It was a rough stretch even by the standards of America’s beleaguered passenger railroad, Amtrak. Five people were killed and more than 160 injured in two major accidents in December and February. Within a three-week period in January, three other Amtrak trains struck automobiles at train crossings, killing four in the automobiles; one of those trains, which struck a garbage truck, was carrying Republican members of the U.S. Congress to a retreat. Amtrak service has long been a target of slights and complaints, yet it soldiers on.

There’s no single explanation, but a common thread. The collisions with automobiles happened at three of the almost 130,000 public highway-rail crossings in the U.S., where train engineers can do little about cars that are on the tracks due to motorist error or recklessness. The Amtrak train that ran off the rails on a curve near Tacoma, Washington, on Dec. 18 was going more than twice the speed limit, a human error that could have been corrected by a costly technological upgrade that’s been delayed for years. The Feb. 4 collision of a New York-to-Miami Amtrak train with an empty freight locomotive in South Carolina -- tentatively blamed on a railroad switch that was set in the wrong position -- occurred on tracks owned and maintained by freight railway giant CSX Corp. Freight companies like CSX own most of the tracks Amtrak trains use.