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Via Derailment

February 27, 2012 by · Comments Off on Via Derailment 

Via Derailment, The event recorder from the wreckage of a fatal Via Rail train derailment west of Toronto was recovered Monday morning, offering investigators hope of finding out what caused the accident.

The Transportation Safety Board said today that the train was switching tracks when it derailed near Burlington, Ont., on Sunday afternoon.

The TSB’s lead investigator, Tom Griffith, told a news conference the event recorder appeared at first to have been damaged, but investigators now expect to recover useful information. The orange-coloured device, sometimes called a black box, is equipped to show the train’s speed, whether the brakes were applied and with what pressure and whether the whistle was blowing, he said.

The recovered Via Rail event recorder sits on the floor of a Transportation Safety Board vehicle Monday morning at the scene of the derailment in Burlington, Ont. “It tells us everything that that crew was doing inside that locomotive,” he said. “The only thing it does not tell us is the voice. There’s no voice recording on the locomotive. There is in air [crashes], but not on rail.”

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