“…’It’s terrible for everybody. Nobody wants this,’ Brian Kane, executive director of the MBTA Advisory Board, said. ‘One is too many.’
Of the commuter rail’s 63 collisions at street crossings since 2019, the warning system functioned properly in all but one case, Keolis said.
The lone exception appears to have been a January 2022 crash in Wilmington in which the MBTA said human error played a role. A maintenance worker did not return the railroad crossing gates to their normal operating settings after routine work earlier in the day, likely preventing them from dropping as a train approached, the T said. The train hit a car, killing the 68-year-old driver.
Authorities have not described similar failures in any of this year’s crashes.
‘In a lot of cases, the train was doing train things’ — that is, proceeding forward at an appropriate speed when a road vehicle crossed into its path, to devastating results, said Christopher Podgurski, the president of Mass Coastal Railroad and representative for the town of Canton on the MBTA Advisory Board…”
By Will Katcher | 5/11/25