Fatal US crash train ‘moving too fast’

Federal investigators have determined that an Amtrak train that crashed in Philadelphia, killing at least eight people, was careening through the city at 170km/h before it ran off the rails along a sharp curve where the speed limit drops to just 80km/h, yet they still don’t know why it was going so fast.

Robert Sumwalt, of the National Transportation Safety Board, said a data recorder and a video camera in the train’s front end could yield clues to what happened.

Amtrak inspected the stretch of track on Tuesday, just hours before the accident, and found no defects, according to the Federal Railroad Administration.

Sumwalt said the engineer applied the emergency brakes moments before the crash but slowed the train to only 164km/h by the time the locomotive’s black box stopped recording data. The speed limit just before the bend is130km/h, he said.

The attorney for the engineer at the controls of the Amtrak train said yesterday his client has no recollection of the accident.

Appearing on ABC’s Good Morning America, lawyer Robert Goggin said the engineer, Brandon Bostian, 32, of New York, suffered a concussion in Tuesday night’s crash and had 15 staples in his head.

“He remembers coming into curve. He remembers attempting to reduce speed and thereafter he was knocked out,” Goggin said.

The lawyer said the last thing the engineer remembered was coming to, looking for his bag, retrieving his mobile phone and calling 911 for help.

Goggin said that his client was distraught when he learned of the devastation and believes the engineer’s memory will likely return once the head injury subsides.

The engineer refused to give a statement to law enforcement and left a police precinct with a lawyer, police said.

Sumwalt said federal accident investigators want to talk to him but will give him a day or two to recover from the shock of the accident.

Mayor Michael Nutter said he was frustrated to learn how fast the train was going.

“Part of the focus has to be, what was the engineer doing?” Nutter said. “Why are you travelling at that rate of speed?”

More than 200 people aboard the Washington-to-New York train were injured in the wreck, which happened in a decayed industrial neighbourhood not far from the Delaware River just before 9:30pm on Tuesday.

Passengers crawled out the windows of the torn and toppled rail cars in the darkness and emerged dazed and bloody, many of them with broken bones and burns.

At least 10 people remained hospitalised in critical condition.