The motorman of a Purple Line elevated train has told investigators he was distracted by what he thought was a car accident on a street below and did not hear or see warning signals before his train rear-ended another one, a federal investigator said Wednesday.
The 29-year-old CTA operator had worked almost 14 of the last 20 hours when the northbound express hit a Brown Line train late Tuesday afternoon in a collision that sent at least 43 people to area hospitals with minor injuries.
“This was his final trip to his terminus, where he was going to finally end up for the day,” said Cy Gura, safety engineer with the National Transportation Safety Board. “But if you add up those hours, he’d been working for quite a long time.”
The motorman told Gura “he did not feel fatigued,” but CTA President Frank Kruesi said the circumstances raise questions about the maximum time the agency’s operators should be allowed at the throttle.
He and two other operators were put on leave with pay while the investigation is carried out.
Red flashing lights and an alarm in the cab require a motorman to call the command center for permission to move forward under CTA rules. Kruesi said the Purple Line operator called but did not wait for permission.
Soon after the collision, the driver of another Brown Line train pulled north from Merchandise Mart, also ignoring lights and an alarm in the cab. While the 33-year-old motorman stopped 125 feet short of the crash scene ahead, he had also broken the CTA rules. “We are going to have to take other measures in addition to training and re-certification to make sure these rules are followed. There are reasons for these rules, and those reasons are at the very core of running a safe system,” Kruesi said at a news conference Wednesday afternoon.
He added that the operator may have been fatigued and “may have exceeded the hours that, in the professional judgment of the experts in this, he should be working.”
Federal laws dictate maximum hours for airline pilots, truckers and other transportation workers, but the Federal Transit Administration neither requires nor recommends specific rest periods for mass-transit operators or bus drivers.
Kruesi also said the CTA will re-examine how well it has complied with recommendations made by the NTSB on signal rules and certification of operators after two serious train accidents in 2001.
In Tuesday’s accident, the Purple Line motorman had been alerted to traffic ahead and made a radio call to the CTA’s command center, officials said, but didn’t wait for a reply before he accelerated out of the Merchandise Mart station.
The crowded train rolled about 540 feet along an S-curve until the motorman, 10 feet short of the parked Brown Line train, slammed on the emergency brakes, Gura said. He told investigators he was moving about 6 m.p.h.
The two operators accused of violating the rules could face dismissal, said Jack Hruby, the CTA’s vice president of rail operations.
The operator of the parked Brown Line train that was rear-ended had broken no rules, officials said.
Results are pending on drug and alcohol tests, officials said.
Grenade scare carries no weight
Green Line service was halted briefly Wednesday while police investigated a suspect grenade left nearby that turned out to be a paperweight.
A pedestrian spotted the object at 4000 S. Michigan Ave. shortly before 10 a.m. and notified a passing police cruiser, causing the police to order the CTA to evacuate and halt service at the nearby Indiana station. Officers of the city’s Bomb and Arson Unit were called. Bomb experts quickly determined that the object was in fact a replica grenade, and train service was restored in about 10 minutes, police said.
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Edited by Patrick Olsen (polsen@tribune.com) and alBerto Trevino (atrevino@tribune.com)
