The derailment of a Blue Line train Tuesday night occurred near a section of track where a faulty piece of track equipment had been temporarily repaired earlier that evening.
Track crews had fixed a faulty switch, clamping it into position, Metro spokesman Dan Stessel said. A track switch is equipment that controls the path of trains where two sets of track diverge. Stessel would not say how close the derailment was to the actual switch, only saying it was “proximate.”
It’s not clear how, or if, the work may have caused a full six-car train to derail outside the Rosslyn station at the end of Tuesday’s evening rush. Officials are looking at whether equipment failed or individuals made mistakes. Both the train operator and a track technician have been put on paid leave amid the investigation, Stessel said.
| Bad luck rail car? |
| Rail car number 3192 that derailed Tuesday was also involved in a deadly train crash in 1996, when a train ran past the Shady Grove station and crashed into a stopped train in a rail yard, killing the operator. Metro spokesman Dan Stessel said officials are looking into the rail car’s history as part of its investigation into Tuesday’s derailment. The car, one of more than 1,100 in Metro’s fleet, has been operating on Metro for nearly 26 years. |
Metro called the incident a “minor derailment” on Tuesday.
“We’re glad that no one was hurt and that damage was minimal,” Tri-State Oversight Committee Chairman Matt Bassett told The Washington Examiner. “But we take this very seriously. It was a mainline derailment.”
TOC officials, who are charged with monitoring safety on Metro’s rail system, went to the scene late Tuesday but are not conducting their own investigation into the derailment, serving instead in a supporting role to Metro investigators. “Right now we’re confident they’re taking the appropriate steps to investigate it,” Bassett said.
The National Transportation Safety Board is not actively investigating it, either, but is monitoring the case, said spokesman Nick Worrell. The independent agency is still investigating Metro’s last derailment involving passengers in February 2010 on a sidetrack near Farragut North.
In this latest case, no one was injured when the front set of wheels on the lead car came off the track about 7:12 p.m., just after the train left the Rosslyn platform, headed for Franconia-Springfield. About 1,000 people were evacuated out of the back of the train because four rail cars were still along the station platform.
But the incident delayed many riders on the Blue and Orange lines for much of the night. Service was shut down, then trains had to share a single track around the area. Normal service resumed by the morning commute Wednesday.
The derailment also caused some damage to the track equipment, Stessel said. Officials were still assessing whether the rail car was damaged.
