TACOMA — Nearly four years after an Amtrak train derailed and killed three people on a new route through Pierce County, service began again Thursday morning on the Point Defiance Bypass.
Amtrak Cascades trains traveled north and south through the corridor Thursday, crossing on a trestle that spans Interstate 5 south of DuPont. On the morning of Dec. 18, 2017, the bridge was a scene of chaos after the engine and nearly all of the passenger cars derailed from a southbound train that had just left a new station at Tacoma’s Freighthouse Square.
It was the inaugural run for the new corridor. The crash made headlines around the world.
Along with the deaths, 65 people were injured, vehicles on I-5 were crushed and the freeway was shut down for days as investigators examined the scene and equipment was hauled away.
In the intervening years, investigators found fault with all the agencies involved in governing the track and service. Meanwhile, those agencies have implemented new safety controls, upgraded training and fired those responsible for the lapses, they say.
A second start
On Thursday, a Cascades train left the new Tacoma Dome Station just after 8 a.m. Another train was making its way north, set to arrive in Tacoma just before 11 a.m.
A total of eight trains — including Amtrak Cascades and Coast Starlight — will use the bypass daily, Amtrak said. Service north of Seattle is temporarily suspended due to COVID-19 restrictions crossing the border.
Since the derailment, trains have been using the historical route that goes along Tacoma’s waterfront, underground through Ruston, along the shore past the Narrows and through Steilacoom.
The new bypass parallels I-5 between the Tacoma Dome Station and the trestle just south of Mounts Road. After it crosses the freeway there, it joins up with the old route which travels south to the Olympia station.
The route passes through several at-grade crossings in Lakewood. The speed the trains travel at, 79 miles per hour, has long been a sore spot with city officials and residents who say that’s too fast. They raised the alarm long before the 2017 crash.
Years of investigations, hearings and finger pointing after the 2017 crash eventually put the immediate cause as excessive speed — the train never slowed before it took a turn just before entering the bridge. But how the train was allowed to go that fast was a blame shared by many.
The National Transportation Safety Board was “amazed by the amount of failure” by the four agencies responsible for the corridor: Sound Transit; Amtrak; the Washington State Department of Transportation, which funds Cascades service and railcars; and the Federal Railroad Administration, which regulates rail operations.
The engineer at the controls was fired. So was the executive responsible for safety at Sound Transit.
The old waterfront route isn’t retiring. It will be used only by freight trains from now on.
Enhanced safety
The bypass was designed to separate passenger traffic from freight traffic, shave minutes off travel time and allow the system to expand.
That stretch of track now has activated positive train control (PTC) — an automated safety system that slows or stops trains that are operating above permitted speeds. The system was not in place on the day of the 2017 crash.
Railroads use simulators just like airlines do and training has been upgraded in those, Amtrak said.
Sound Transit, which owns and is responsible for the route, implemented progressive speed reductions on the route. Now trains are required to progressively slow before they get to the sharp turn that was the site of the 2017 crash.
