Amtrak Derailment Leaves at Least 3 Dead in Washington State, Officials Say<br />DUPONT, Wash. — A passenger train on a newly opened Amtrak route jumped the tracks on an overpass south of Tacoma on Monday,<br />slamming rail cars into a busy highway, killing at least three people and injuring about 100 others, officials said.<br />Officials said the service is owned by the states of Washington<br />and Oregon, and operated by Amtrak, whereas the Point Defiance Bypass track is owned by Sound Transit, a regional transit agency, and dispatched by BNSF, the freight company that used to own the line.<br />Positive train control could have prevented some of the nation’s worst rail disasters, like the 2008 collision of a commuter train and a freight train in Los Angeles<br />that killed 25 people, or the 2015 derailment of an Amtrak train in Philadelphia that went into a curve at more than twice the allowed speed, an accident that killed eight people.<br />Location of derailment<br />The Washington State Department of Transportation has said<br />that the entire Cascades route will have the system by mid-2018, but it was not clear whether it was in operation on Monday on any part of the line.<br />Backed by the state of Washington, Sound Transit, the regional transit agency, used $180 million from the 2009<br />federal stimulus package to buy an old 14.5-mile stretch of track and upgrade it for faster passenger service.<br />“It appears that all of the fatalities are contained in the rail cars<br />that went into the woods,” said Detective Ed Troyer, a spokesman for the Pierce County Sheriff’s Department, adding that rescue workers were using chain saws to try to reach victims in those cars.
