Following a deadly crash just outside Philadelphia earlier this month, Amtrak today announced that it will outfit the interior of its locomotives with cameras to monitor the performance of its trains and engineers.
Amtrak plans to have cameras installed in ACS-64 locomotives that run on the Northeast Corridor line by year's end, while any new ones will be equipped with cameras before they hit the tracks.
"Inward-facing video cameras will help improve safety and serve as a valuable investigative tool," Amtrak's president and CEO, Joe Boardman, said in a statement. "We have tested these cameras and will begin installation as an additional measure to enhance safety."
Seventy locomotives that operate between Washington, New York, and Boston, as well as New York, Philadelphia, and Harrisburg, Pa. will be the first to get the new cameras. Acela Express and diesel locomotives will get them eventually, too.
The train involved in this month's accident was equipped with "black box" technology, which provided data about the train's speed, but it did not include footage of what happened inside the train.
For years, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) has urged the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) to add these types of devices to locomotives. But as the AP reported after this month's crash, the FRA and local unions pushed back, arguing that it would be a blow to worker morale.
Amtrak says it currently has outward-facing cameras and other "advanced systems" installed on trains.
According to a 2013 Amtrak newsletter, that includes "locomotive video cameras to record activities ahead of the locomotive on the right of way, global positioning system (GPS) equipment to enable timely and accurate train tracking, an on-board messaging system to permit two-way communications between the Consolidated National Operations Center (CNOC) and the locomotive engineer, a fuel-monitoring system to track fuel availability and send alerts on low-fuel conditions and locomotive health monitoring to track and report onboard system diagnostics. It also has an automatic emergency brake alert feature."
One thing that wasn't installed along the tracks of the Philadelphia crash was speed control technology. As NPR noted, technology that can automatically slow down or stop a train is being added to our rail system, but had not yet been deployed to the area of the crash.