Test Runs at Site of Amtrak Crash Point to Error

The engineer of the Conrail locomotive involved in last week’s fatal train wreck near Baltimore should have been able to stop as far as half a mile from where he pulled out in front of a packed Amtrak passenger train, results of tests conducted at the crash site indicated.

Federal safety officials on Monday drove three locomotives identical to those involved in the Jan. 4 accident over the same tracks. They ran the test three times, and at the point where a stop signal first became visible, the engineer on the test locomotive was able to bring his train to a halt well before the switch where the tracks merged and the accident occurred. The Conrail engineer has said that he applied his emergency brakes when he recognized the stop signal.

The results of the braking tests suggested that human error, not mechanical failure, was the major cause of the accident, which killed 15 people on the Amtrak train, officials said.

An attorney for Richard Gates, the Conrail engineer, called the test runs “inappropriate,” and suggested that Monday’s weather conditions were different from those of the afternoon of the collision.