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Trade-off. Amtrak’s Point Defiance Bypass route in the Tacoma area of Washington State opened on December 18, 2017, to great fanfare (from the Washington State Department of Transportation or WSDOT) and to a terrible, tragic wreck (on or near a curve approaching an overpass over Interstate 5). Ironically, the new bypass had been designed specifically to reduce both congestion and slow track speeds near Point Defiance and Puget Sound on the old route.
Amtrak Cascades service shared the old route with Sounder commuter trains and BNSF freights. In addition, the old route included many slow curves and tunnels and did not allow the optimal 79mph speed sought by the state and Amtrak to improve scheduling. The bypass would not share track time with commuter trains, and was termed by WSDOT to carry only “a few” BNSF freights, which would continue using the line.
Also, ironically, the accident at first look does not appear to have been caused by either the engineering of the line or the sharing of track time with freights. Instead, it simply appears that the train was going too fast for the curve, a matter of an operator both being familiar with the line and observing speed restrictions.
Compromise? Just as the news media raise the question of gun laws and restrictions every time there is a mass shooting, they have come out in full force with the statement that Positive Train Control, or PTC, would have prevented this accident---unsupported, I might add, by any scientific evidence, but wholly supported by the opinions of “experts” who are already on record as proponents of PTC. I'll throw in my two cents and say that PTC probably could have prevented this one.
It is a fair question, however, why a new route, in the works since at least 1997, according to recent reports, didn’t have the time, money, or design expertise to include operating PTC after twenty years of planning. (In classic closing of the barn door after the horses have escaped, WSDOT has subsequently announced that the Point Defiance Bypass will not be put back into service without PTC.)
Trade-off? It has also since been reported that the original planning for the line called for straightening or easing the curve where the accident took place. This was reported most recently by KUOW News. After all, this is supposed to be a high-speed line, with an 80mph projected speed for trains. The curve, known to need a 30-mph speed restriction, would have cost, it is rumored, more to straighten than the total amount available for the project.
The proximity of the curve to the bridge over the Interstate, seen in aerial or drone photographs by just about anyone who has been looking, suggests that this is true. The only engineering options I see in those photographs would have been some substantial land acquisition coupled with moving the line farther from the Interstate on the approach to the bridge, or demolishing and building a much longer bridge at a much more acute angle to the Interstate.
The latter would have been a tremendous disruption to Interstate traffic, as well as a higher-cost alternative, and the former would probably have triggered major environmental hurdles as well as further delays over objections from land owners. This is to say nothing of other engineering considerations such as grade, water table, condition of subsoil, and proximity to a watercourse. I could go on.
Whether the rumored costs are true or not, it is a known fact that improvements for the whole projected line would have cost almost four times the available funding, and the curve was one of the improvements deleted to fit the funding.
Alas, there is still no reason the line couldn’t have been operated safely, if a bit slower, even with the speed restriction. It is deeply concerning that it was not.
©2017 – C. A. Turek – mistertrains@gmail.com
(Charles A. Turek is a writer and novelist based in Albuquerque, NM. After four decades working in areas of the insurance industry related to transportation, he now writes on all aspects of American railroading. Charles is a political conservative but believes in public funding of passenger rail as a part of the federal government’s constitutionally conservative obligation to provide for defense and public infrastructure so that private enterprise may flourish.)
