The founding Deputy Director of NJ Transit is Martin Robins. He joins NJTV News Anchor Mary Alice Williams and Correspondent Michael Hill by phone.
Williams: Gov. Christie said we can’t determine the cure until we know the cause. But we do know that New York Penn Station has a system that stops a runaway train in its track. What about Hoboken?
Robins: I don’t believe it does. We saw something that happened here, a runaway train, and it wasn’t stopped. I’m not sure what Gov. Christie is really talking about. We know about positive train control and there’s a federal mandate to put that into effect and that’s when a train is exceeding the speed that it’s supposed to be going at. You have to remember, this is right at the platform at the end where the passengers board. The speed in that area is minimal, less than 5 miles per hour that would be permissible. Positive train control, if it were in place, would have definitely had an effect on what was going on here. But, there’s much to be learned about what exactly happened and we don’t know all the answers. But there is positive train control as an antidote to this type of issue. Amtrak has just finished it on the Northeast Corridor. Metro-North was cited for not having it when the accident occurred at Spuyten Duyvil and the engineer fell asleep and the train was going well above the speed limit there and went off the tracks. And here, you know there’s a suspicion that something like that happened, that there was some kind of incapacity in terms of the engineer and positive train control might well have been a way to prevent this from happening. NJ Transit is in the process, I think, of working towards the installation of positive train control, but it is not yet there. I’m not sure what the effect was of Gov. Christie’s order to prevent NJ Transit from doing capital work, whether it applied to that particular project. I hope it did not. Even if it did not, the project still wasn’t finished. A new federal deadline has been established and hopefully NJ Transit can make that one. Hopefully we won’t have crashes caused by incapacity of engineers anymore, but that all supposes that that’s the reason for the crash and I may be jumping ahead of where we really are in the facts and Gov. Christie was right on that point.
Hill: Martin, I’m going to ask you this: is there anything like an air traffic control system at these terminals? At the Hoboken Terminal and the other train stations, anything like an air traffic control that controls trains coming in and stuff like that?
Robins: There’s a central dispatching operation that directs the engineers as to what to do. That’s out in the Meadowlands. But something happened here that obviously violated the basic operating premise of a railroad engineer approaching a station. Every time, as I said, every train that approaches Hoboken Terminal is reduced to less than 5 miles an hour and inches its way along the platform. That’s the way it works, so something went dramatically wrong here and the only way it could have been prevented was some kind of an automatic mechanism that overrode the actions of the engineer. And as I said, it would be installed in every single train and that’s what the Federal Railroad Administration has been trying to advance and only with a moderate amount of luck. This is another case where if it had been installed, it may have prevented a tragedy but we have to wait and see.