Sunday's crash in the Bronx is the second passenger train derailment in six months for the rail service and presents Metro-North with another problem in what has been a year plagued by safety issues.
— On Sept. 25, a feeder cable in suburban Mount Vernon, N.Y., failed, knocking out power for 12 days to Metro-North's New Haven line, which carries 132,000 commuters daily.
— On July 18, 10 freight train cars hauling garbage derailed in New York City, and service was suspended.
— On May 28, track foreman Robert Luden was struck and killed by a passenger train in West Haven, Conn. The National Transportation Safety Board says he had requested a track section be taken out of service for maintenance, and the section was placed back in service too soon by a student traffic controller who didn't have the required approval.
— On May 17, an eastbound train derailed in Bridgeport, Conn., and was struck by a westbound train. The accident injured 73 passengers, two engineers and a conductor.
This month, Metro-North's chief engineer, Robert Puciloski, told members of the National Transportation Safety Board investigating the May derailment and Luden's death that the railroad is "behind in several areas," including a five-year schedule of cyclical maintenance that had not been conducted in the area of the Bridgeport derailment since 2005.
The NTSB issued an urgent recommendation to Metro-North that it use "redundant protection" such as a procedure known as "shunting" in which crews attach a device to the rail in a work zone alerting the dispatcher to inform approaching trains to stop.
U.S. & World
The September disruption resulted in significant increases in highway traffic in Connecticut along the already busy Interstate 95 and Merritt Parkway, cost Connecticut's economy $62 million and prompted criticism by officials of Con Edison, the New York utility that operates the failed cable.
