At about 2:39 a.m. on 6 January 2005, Norfolk Southern freight train 192 was running through Graniteville, South Carolina, at roughly 47 mph when it met a mainline switch that had been left lined for an industry siding. The switch diverted the through freight off the main line and into the siding, where it collided head-on with a parked, unoccupied train. Three of train 192’s tank cars carrying chlorine derailed; one was breached, releasing a dense cloud of chlorine gas over the sleeping town. Nine people died, including the engineer of train 192; hundreds were treated for respiratory injury, and about 5,400 residents within a mile of the site were evacuated for days.
The chain of events was not mechanical. The switch at the Avondale Mills industry track was a manually operated, hand-throw switch, and it was the responsibility of a crew to return it to the normal — main line — position after finishing work there. The crew of a local train, train P22, had used the industry track earlier and parked their train clear of the main line. When they secured for the night, the switch was not relined to the main line. It stayed set for the siding. Hours later, train 192, with the right of way and no reason to expect a diverted route, ran into it in the dark.
The National Transportation Safety Board investigated and issued railroad accident report RAR-05/04, adopting it on 29 November 2005. Its probable cause was the failure of the crew of train P22 to return the mainline switch to the normal position after completing their work at the industry track. The Board found a contributing factor in the absence of any feature or mechanism that would have reminded the crew of the switch’s position and prompted them to reline it before leaving — there was nothing in the system to catch the omission. This is an operator/crew finding: a procedural failure in the operation of the railroad, not a defect in a train, a rail, or a tank car’s basic function.
The disaster was, after Lac-Mégantic, among the most consequential American rail-hazmat events of its era. It reshaped how the industry treats the position of hand-thrown switches in dark (unsignaled) territory and intensified scrutiny of how chlorine and other toxic-inhalation-hazard materials are routed and carried by rail.
At about 2:35 a.m. on 4 February 2018, southbound Amtrak train 91 — the Silver Star, running overnight from New York to Miami — was diverted off the main track through a reversed hand-throw switch at Cayce, South Carolina, and collided head-on with a stationary CSX Transportation freight train parked on a siding. The two crew members in the lead locomotive, engineer Michael Kempf and conductor Michael Cella, were killed; about 116 other people aboard were injured out of the roughly 147 passengers and crew. The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) investigated and, in report RAR-19/02, found the collision was fundamentally an operational failure of risk management around a switch and a suspended signal system — not a track, equipment, or material defect.
The accident happened inside a stretch of CSX’s Columbia Subdivision where the automatic signal system had been deliberately taken out of service. CSX was installing components for positive train control (PTC), the federally mandated overlay designed, among other things, to stop a train approaching a misaligned switch. With the signals suspended, trains in the area were being run by track warrant and verbal authority, and the normal electronic backstop that would have flagged a wrongly lined switch was gone. A CSX local freight crew that had used the Charleston Highway siding earlier that night failed to return the hand-throw switch to its normal position lining the main track. Nothing else in the system caught the error.
The NTSB’s probable cause was unambiguous about where accountability lay. The board found that the collision was caused by CSX’s failure to assess and mitigate the risk of operating through a signal suspension — a condition that eliminated the system redundancy for detecting a switch in the wrong position — compounded by the CSX conductor’s failure to properly reposition the switch for the main track. The board further found that the Federal Railroad Administration’s (FRA) failure to implement effective regulation against misaligned-switch accidents, and Amtrak’s failure to conduct its own risk assessment before operating during the signal suspension, contributed to the accident. The verdict is therefore organizational and operational: a single human act of leaving a switch reversed was allowed to become lethal because the operators had stripped away every layer that should have stood behind it.
The Cayce collision came within a few weeks of two other high-profile Amtrak incidents and intensified scrutiny of the railroad’s safety oversight and of the slow national rollout of PTC. Litigation followed, with claims against CSX and Amtrak, and the NTSB used the case to renew long-standing recommendations that railroads operate at restricted speed near switches whenever a signal suspension is in effect.