A Head-On Amtrak Crash

It happens dozens of times a day: trains traveling in opposite directions over the same short stretch of track, carefully diverted from disaster by red and green signals. Last week one such routine maneuver went tragically awry. Amtrak's New England Zip, heading from Washington, D.C., to Boston, rammed head-on into another Amtrak train, the Shoreliner, en route from Boston to New York City, on a trestle 80 ft. above a shopping district in Queens, N.Y. The crash left Spanish Diplomat Enrique Gilarranz dead and 125 other passengers injured. When an Amtrak train hit a pickup truck at a grade crossing in South Carolina three days later, killing one person, the number of fatal Amtrak accidents in the past month reached five.

Human error may have been responsible for the Queens crash.

Amtrak Veteran Rodney Rosemond had been on the signal-tower job for only two weeks. Rosemond, who has been suspended, may have failed to throw the red signal that would have told the Zip's engineer to stop and wait for the Shoreliner to pass.