Railroad Collisions, A Deadly Story of Mismanaged Risk

by George Swimmer

Overview

Citizen-advocate George Swimmer spent twenty years investigating the causes behind railroad collisions. What he discovered is a tangled mess of both inadvertent and intentional mismanagement.

In Railroad Collisions, Swimmer reveals his findings. He faults the railroads themselves for poor risk management, but the industry is by no means the only culpable party. The Federal Railroad Administration's timid dealings with railroad companies impairs meaningful changes, while the National Transportation Safety Board's findings in many of their accident investigations are woefully, fatally incorrect.

From commuter train collisions to engineer fatigue and a nationwide epidemic of incorrectly set safety crossing lights, Swimmer paints a picture of an industry willing to put complacency ahead of safety, often actively working against positive change.

Swimmer supports his arguments with concrete examples. His interviews with locomotive engineers and a former safety director are thought-provoking and hard-hitting, while discussions with the parents of children killed in preventable railroad accidents provide a compassionate glimpse into the human cost of mismanaged risk.

Doing for railway transportation what Ralph Nader's Unsafe at Any Speed did for the automobile industry, Railroad Collisions is a sobering look at how mismanagement and misinformation endangers lives throughout America's sprawling rail system. This 2018 update includes additional information supporting many of the arguments made in the original publication. The update also analyzes some more recent railroad collisions.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781517106331
Publisher:	CreateSpace Publishing
Publication date:	11/25/2015
Pages:	330
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.69(d)

About the Author

George Swimmer is a certified public accountant (CPA) who received his bachelor of science degree from Northern Illinois University. A registered investment advisor, Swimmer holds various insurance licenses and is a certified nurse's assistant (CNA).

An outspoken citizen advocate who spent over twenty years investigating train accidents and arguing for improved railroad safety, Swimmer is a recipient of the Citizen Advocacy Center's Citizen Initiative Award, the Lions Clubs International Foundation's Melvin Jones Fellow Award, and the DuPage Railroad Safety Council's Jonathan Goers Award.

A former member of the Illinois Task Force on Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders (FASD), Swimmer also served as a member of the Marine Corps Active Reserves.

Editorial Reviews

2016-02-18
An impassioned indictment of the current system of rail safety in the United States. In this debut, Swimmer addresses the problem of fatal railway accidents, particularly those that occur at grade crossings where drivers and pedestrians share space with trains. He provides a detailed analysis of several collisions from the past two decades, along with their resulting investigations and policy effects. He draws on media coverage, interviews with transportation officials, and reports by state and federal agencies that regulate train travel. The book reveals a complex, consistent pattern of problems, including malfunctioning signals, a lack of clear authority ("you can't run a train across Chicago without at least four different sets of rules, signals, or safety systems"), and work schedules that maximize train-operator fatigue and inattention. Although pedestrians, drivers, train operators, railway management, and government regulators all come in for criticism, the book saves its harshest judgments for the last two groups; the government, Swimmer says, prefers recommendations to mandates, and railroads require repeated lobbying before making changes as minor as instructing engineers to turn on all their headlights. Many collisions in this book took place near Swimmer's home in the Chicago suburbs, a region with a disproportionate number of railroad fatalities. He draws clear portraits of the accident victims, often through interviews with surviving relatives, and makes their personalities integral to the stories. The prose is often unpolished (including frequent use of the phrase "a accident"), and it tends to repeat information unnecessarily, such as the fact that railroad rest facilities aren't intended to be places to sleep. However, Swimmer's evident passion for and knowledge about the subject shine through, and he does an excellent job of making accident reports and unfamiliar geography understandable for railway novices. A thoroughly researched, often clearly explained story of transportation disasters and what can be done to prevent them.

Kirkus Reviews