SANTO DOMINGO.- Yesterday, Saturday, a collision between two Santo Domingo Metro trains near the Mamá Tingó station in Villa Mella left nine people injured, in an unprecedented event in the 14 years that the Dominican railway system has been in operation, considered one of the safest in the region.
A young man, who trained for a year to drive these types of trains, explained that the only way for an event of this nature to occur is if the driver overrides the safety system, which detects if there is any anomaly, such as a train ahead or excessive speed, and automatically brakes the carriage.
An expert on the subject, who asked to remain anonymous, told Diario Libre that one of the trains may have braked automatically, and that the driver possibly didn't realize why it was braking and overridden the train's safety system to continue moving, which, in his opinion, caused the "train collision.".
"For example: If there's a train heading to Mamá Tingó station and another one at Gilbert (Gregorio Urbano Gilbert) station, the signal is red. Until the other train is on the tracks, the signal won't change at Gilbert because the system automatically detects that there's a train ahead, and the signal won't turn green until the track is clear," explained the expert, who asked to remain anonymous.
He insisted that "with the train's safety system activated, there's no way an accident can happen. This is one of the safest railway systems in Latin America. "If you disable this safety system, the driver can do whatever he wants with the train, even if the signal is red."
When questioned about why a driver might disable the safety system, he explained that when the system issues an alert, the driver must call the control center so that authorization can be given to disable the safety system after verifying that the train can continue its journey. However, drivers don't do this because issuing an alert could result in penalties, and he gave the following example:
"If you arrive at a signal and the train stops, you've already made a mistake. If you ran the red light, then they (the drivers), for fear of being penalized, don't report it because they don't know why the train stopped. If it was due to speeding, they don't know, because trains also brake automatically when they exceed the speed limit. So, what happens is that since they don't know why the train stopped, that's where the problem arises. By not paying attention, what they do is disable the safety system so they don't have to call the command center and can continue on their way," according to the publication.
In giving this example, he cited the video of the subway driver that went viral this Saturday because the young woman was driving with her head down, looking at her cell phone. He said that this is one of the cases in which a driver might not know why the train issued an alert because they are distracted.
The train's safety system monitors the driving, applying the emergency brake or preventing other actions when certain safety conditions are not met.
Source: Diario Libre.
