Inspections Missed Cracked Rail Joint

Despite repeated inspections, no one spotted rail joint cracks that derailed three Union Pacific locomotives and 11 freight cars near Whittier last fall, damaging at least four homes and forcing the evacuation of 100 residents, federal safety officials said Wednesday.

Most, if not all, of the inspections were made from moving cars passing over the defective rail joint, the National Transportation Safety Board said. The safety board said the cracks that caused the Oct. 16 wreck “are extremely difficult, if not impossible, to see from a moving vehicle.”

The last such inspection was conducted just two days before the accident.

Although all the inspections were done under guidelines approved by the Federal Railroad Administration, there is no “adequate on-the-ground inspection program for identifying cracks in rail joint bars before they grow to critical size,” the NTSB said in a report released Wednesday.

Even ultrasound technology used in some inspections is ineffective in finding the hairline cracks because the shape of the rails and the joint bars that connect the rails make some areas inaccessible, the report said.

The mile-long train had left East Los Angeles about 9:15 a.m. on Oct. 16, en route to Yuma, Ariz., and Marion, Tenn.

About 9:40 a.m., as the train neared Whittier at 57 mph, the engineer felt a bump.

Seconds later, three of the train’s four locomotives and the first 11 freight cars derailed, pitching more than 30 cargo containers into the backyards of homes. Power lines fell, and the 605 Freeway was temporarily shut down. About 5,000 gallons of fuel spilled from the train’s ruptured fuel tanks, the federal agency said.

Despite damage estimated at $2.7 million, there were no serious injuries. The NTSB said the accident was caused by gradually widening fatigue cracks in a pair of metal bars, called joint bars, that are bolted to the ends of each rail. These bars clamp the ends of rails together, providing the continuous path along which a train rolls.

The NTSB said that when the freight train passed over the cracked joint bars, they broke, causing the rails to pull apart and the train to derail.

The single track where the derailment occurred was laid in 1991, the railroad said. Rails are replaced when the accumulated weight that moves over the tracks reaches 1.2 billion to 2 billion tons, Union Pacific spokesman John Bromley said. The rail that failed had accumulated about 486 million tons when the accident occurred, he said.

The Federal Railroad Administration and Union Pacific said studies are underway to improve rail joints. The administration says it is developing a means of inspecting joint bars with automated, vehicle-mounted photo-imaging technology. The railroad said it was looking into laser technology.

Times staff writer Eric Malnic contributed to this report.