LOS ANGELES Video cameras will be installed in Metrolink train engines by September to improve safety and to avoid crashes like the one that killed 25 people and injured 130 others in Los Angeles last year, reports the Associated Press.
The Metrolink board of directors voted to approve a $975,000 contract with Railhead Vision Systems, based in Chicago, to install the video cameras.
Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa says Metrolink will be the first commuter rail agency in the country to install video cameras that will record all engineer and other staff activity. The cameras will face ahead of the train and inside the cabs for forensic and investigative purposes.
The move comes eight months after an engineer, Robert Sanchez, was sending text messages before he ran a red light and crashed his Metrolink train into an oncoming Union Pacific train.
Sanchez, 46, was the only one of five train workers three on the freight train and two on the commuter one to die in the crash. The 24 others who were killed were all passengers on the Metrolink train.
The Sept. 12 crash was the deadliest commuter train accident in the nation since 1972, when 45 people died in Chicago, and the deadliest train crash of any kind since a 1993 Amtrak crash in Mobile, Ala., in which 47 people died.
In early October, a day after the National Transportation Safety Board said Sanchez appeared to have been sending a text message about 22 seconds before his train collided with the freight train, the Federal Railroad Administration issued an emergency order banning most cellphone use by locomotive engineers, nine years after it began discussing the issue.
The order noted that cellphone use had been banned or restricted by nearly all railroads. With a federal order in place, those employees caught violating the rule could face temporary or permanent suspensions, or fines of thousands of dollars.
(The preceding article was published May 18, 2009, by the Associated Press.)
