Not long after the terrible train collision last month which resulted in 25 deaths, the investigators have managed to establish not only the circumstances leading to the accident, but also one of the several elements that contributed to the collision.

The federal investigators have already established that the Metrolink train engineer was texting a message on his cell phone just second before impact, ignoring stop signs signaling the approach of another train.

By taking into consideration the time the engineer sent his message, the possibility that he might have been incapacitated prior to the crash is highly unlikely.

This represented enough evidence for federal regulators to ban the use of cellular phone or any other electronic devices by train engineers while on duty. If they do not respect the rule, according to the Federal Railroad Administration, they are at risk of losing their jobs and being fined.

The accident was preventable, according to investigators and representatives of the National Transportation Safety Board, and human errors such as this one should not happen again in the future, if the appropriate technology will be set in place.

Even though the train collision was probably produced by a human error, attorneys of the victims or victims’ families believe the train company is just as guilty, for not putting in place an efficient system got keeping such accidents from happening.

The best solution to prevent train collisions such as this one would be implementing the Positive Train Control system to automatically override mistakes made by human operators. This will cost the rail companies a lot of money, but the costs can’t be greater than losing human lives.