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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.
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