Safety Panel Unable to Decide Cause of Fatal Amtrak Crash
WASHINGTON — The National Transportation Safety Board said Tuesday it could not determine what caused two Amtrak passenger trains to end up on the same track and collide last July in New York City, killing one person and injuring more than 100 others.
The NTSB’s report on the July 23 accident at the Hell Gate Bridge in Queens said “it was impossible to determine conclusively whether a tower operator had failed to set the (stop) signal . . . for the train approaching from Manhattan or whether the engineer simply went past a stop signal.”
Investigators were hampered by the fact that they could not interview the engineer of the train that passed the signal point because doctors said he was suffering from partial amnesia.
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