Amtrak makes progress, but safety issues persist

Amtrak cut its annual operating losses by nearly half last year while improving customer service — cleaner restrooms and better training for those who deal with passengers — but the company still has a weak safety culture that has cost 20 passengers and employees their lives since 2012, according to a report by the railroad’s inspector general.

The nation’s passenger rail corporation cut its operating losses to $194 million last year, a 46 percent drop, and expects to reduce that loss by an additional $14 million in fiscal 2018. The railroad plans to eliminate its losses by 2021, the report said.

Amtrak’s inspector general said the savings were made by culling the ranks of management and identifying other cost-cutting measures, even as the railroad spruced up passenger car interiors, did a better job with restrooms, provided more training for “customer-facing” workers and upgraded its train engines.

But the inspector general cites the National Transportation Safety Board in saying that a “weak safety culture” has contributed to crashes, derailments and other issues that have killed 11 passengers and nine Amtrak workers since October 2012.

After a pair of crashes in December and February that killed five people, Amtrak’s customer satisfaction index and its bookings for long-distance trips plummeted. Between the two incidents, Amtrak named a former airline executive as its chief safety officer.

“As recommended in the report, we have made significant steps to become America’s safest passenger railroad,” Amtrak said in a response to the inspector general’s report.

Primary among those steps is implementation of what is known as positive train control (PTC), a system designed to remove human error from train movement, preventing crashes. Preliminary reports suggest that PTC could have prevented both crashes last winter, as well as crashes on freight and passenger railroads that the NTSB says have killed 141 and injured 2,426 since 1988.