Washington Amtrak Derailment Under Investigation

Investigators looking into Monday’s deadly Amtrak derailment in Washington state say it appears the engineer did not apply the emergency brake. Three passengers were killed and dozens more were injured when the train went off the tracks. 

Crews removed the locomotive from Monday’s deadly train derailment in Washington state. Other train cars were removed from the interstate yesterday, but the locomotive was too heavy for flatbed truck brought in to haul it away.

The train’s event data recorder shows the train was traveling at 80 miles per hour in a 30 mile per hour zone when it went off the tracks. Federal investigators say it appears the engineer did not manually slow the train down as it approached the curve.

The national transportation safety board is looking into whether the engineer didn’t sense the danger because he was distracted. There were two people in the lead locomotive cab – the engineer and a conductor in-training.

New photos show the damage from inside the passenger compartment. The NTSB says the video recording system from the inward and outward facing cameras on the train was damaged in the crash. The equipment is now headed to the agency’s lab for analysis.