Nearly once every hour, somewhere in the country, a train falls of the track, collides with another train or has some other sort of mishap. Often the accident is miles from nowhere. Only occasionally does a fiery and fatal crash in a metropolitan area draw national attention.
Fortunately, there are lots of data to help reporters find out where accidents are occurring and which railroads have the worst records. The Federal Railroad Administration has downloadable data files for the past six years on its Web site. These cover accidents by every railroad, employee injuries, and accidents at railroad crossings. The site also has text and tables from the annual report on safety.
Caution: One accident can have multiple records - one for each railroad involved and one for the track owner. You must group by accident ID, date, time and the track owner when counting accidents. Double-check your results against the annual report.
A rail-crossing accident is the most frequent cause of deaths. You can easily find how many accidents occurred in your area in the federal data. Then check out the safety features of the crossings. Many crossings are without gates. Watch drivers when they cross; sometimes they will ignore warning signals just to save a couple of seconds.
Old and rickety track is the leading cause of train accidents. Find out which railroad has the most accidents caused by bad track and then figure out why. As railroads cut back workers, there just aren't enough to repair the broken track. Railroads, too, haul ore and other loads too heavy for some kinds of track.
To increase profits, railroads are sending out cars with serious defects. These include broken wheels inoperative brakes, and bad shock-absorbing mechanisms. Ask for FRA inspections of the railroad you are covering. Talk to the workers who fix the trains.
SUBWAYS:
Want to know how many people were injured in your subway or metro? How many were robbed, and how that compares to big cities? Or how much it costs to run the system?
The answers can all be found in great detail in data on the Web site of the Federal Transit Administration. There are data on accidents, crime, and costs. The data are in Lotus spreadsheets and cover 1993-96. The data also contain the miles traveled for each system. You can establish a rate of accidents per mile traveled to equalize results between systems of different sizes.
Penny Loeb can be reached by e-mail at pioeb@usnews.com