Vol. 78/No. 11      March 24, 2014

Romansoff, who had worked for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority for eight years, was hit shortly before 1 a.m. on Manhattan’s East Side by a train en route from the city to upstate Poughkeepsie.

His death is the latest in a series of so-called accidents on Metro-North trains over the last year. The railway bosses’ relentless drive for profit over the past few decades has led to cuts in crew size, speedup, skimping on maintenance and refusals to install safety equipment.

Four passengers were killed and more than 70 injured when a train derailed in the Bronx Dec. 1. An initial media campaign to blame the train’s engineer for the crash subsided after rail workers organized a campaign to defend him and facts surfaced about the company’s long-standing neglect of safety.

Under a federal law passed in 2008 after a deadly derailment in California, all major freight and passenger companies are required to implement a more extensive automated safety system — Positive Train Control — by 2015. Metro-North says the earliest it can get the system on track is 2019.

Even without Positive Train Control, the derailment could have been avoided. Just a week after it occurred Metro-North installed sensors in the track at the curve where the derailment took place. The sensors trigger an alarm that automatically applies the brakes if the engineer doesn’t slow the train down before entering the curve. The company also could have assigned a co-worker to be in the lead car together with the engineer, a standard practice until rail bosses slashed crew sizes.

In September, an electrical cable failed in Mount Vernon, N.Y., knocking out service for 132,000 commuters for 12 days. In July, a freight train derailed in the Bronx, at the same curve as the Dec. 1 incident. In late May, a track foreman was killed in West Haven, Conn., when a passenger train hit him. Earlier that month a passenger train derailed in Bridgeport, Conn., injuring 73 passengers, two engineers and a conductor.

A week before Romansoff’s death the MTA announced its “100-Day Action Plan,” to “promote a culture of safety.”

In a request for comment, an MTA spokesperson referred to its statement saying, “The incident is under investigation.”
 
 
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