I am talking only about situations where the normal safety features are not working, which would be well less than 1% of the time.
According to a Wall Street Journal article:
Perhaps a simple “Did you reset the switch…” after the “we’re through” would have been enough to have prevented the collision. From what I have read of the commercial aviation industry they seem to be doing a lot of double checking. But your view would be that this double-checking is unnecessary since “professionals can always be relied on to do their jobs”
When I was younger I had access to Railroad magazine issues from the Thirties. Besides fiction there were historic stories by the old timers as far back as the 1880s One guy was hired as a brakeman and had been taught by his conductor to, when his train was sent onto a siding to meet another train, throw the switch back for the mainline, lock it, then stand on the opposite side of the track from the switch. He generally did so but one time when the meet was early, early, in the morning, he neglected to cross the track. He stood there in a half-doze until the approaching train was upon him whereupon he was startled awake with the thought, “Ohmygod! I forgot to reline the switch!” and tried to throw it in front of the approaching train. The lock stopped him. Automatic routine can be a killer.
Amtrak is our passenger carrier, but except for some trackage in the Northeast corridor, owns none of the right-of-way itself; they move on the tracks of the freight carriers and their movements are under those carriers’ authority.* This accident is squarely on CSX’s shoulders, whether by some error in dispatching or the crew on the ground.
*In fact during the early days, there was some grumbling about the freight line dispatchers giving precedence to their own freights over Amtrak’s passenger trains.
This is already the case, with USA trains (possibly Canada & Mexico as well) being the most over-engineered and crash protected in the world. In theory they would be the safest, but all that extra weight means they are expensive to build and use too much diesel. This extra cost makes rail much less viable than it is in the rest of the world and goes someway to explain why passenger train coverage is so sparse in the states. And another reason why car travel is so predominant. There’s an argument to be made that America’s strict health & safety legislation for rail is killing people as it is leaving many with little alternative than to travel by the comparatively unregulated (safety wise) private motor car.