Report issued on train near-miss that traumatized Lincoln resident

In a 138-page report, Keolis analyzed the factors involved in the terrifying near-miss between an MBTA commuter train and a car crossing the tracks in Lincoln last spring and recommended fixes so it won’t happen again. But the woman who was driving the car isn’t over it — not by a long shot.

Lincoln resident Betsey Yeats was crossing the tracks eastbound on Route 117 on April 11 after picking up her 17-year-old daughter from a private school in Sudbury. “I’ve been going over that crossing four times a day for 20 years. You get used to trusting that it works,” she told the Lincoln Squirrel. Because of a curve in the tracks and a tree blocking the sight line,”it’s not until you’re really on the track that you can see the train,” which suddenly roared into view. “I felt my body stop and freeze. My foot went off the gas.”

The driver of the train, which was traveling at about 50 miles per hour, saw her car and immediately sounded the horn. “The horn was deafening. My brain didn’t tell my body to move my foot, but somehow I pushed [the accelerator] down to the floor without realizing what I was doing,” Yeats said. Her SUV cleared the train’s path just in time. “I could feel the rush of the train behind us. When I looked in my rear-view mirror, all I could see was the train rushing through. Then I saw the blinking light and the gates coming down… Without a V-8 engine, I don’t know if we would’ve gotten out of there.”

The train screeched to a halt with the last car blocking the road at the crossing, and the conductor notified the dispatcher about three minutes afterwards at 3:18 p.m. Meanwhile, Yeats called Lincoln police, who also reached the dispatcher five minutes later, according to the report by Keolis, which operates the commuter rail for the MBTA. 

The incident report is dated April 26, but town officials did not see it until fairly recently because the MBTA and the Federal Railway Administration had to review it and “make sure they were comfortable with it,” Town Administrator Tim Higgins told the Select Board on September 19. Higgins and Police Chief Kevin Kennedy first met with MBTA officials on April 28 and “we got early confirmation at that meeting that it appeared to be human error,” he said.

On that day in April, a Keolis communications and signals maintainer was calibrating the warning system (the connection between the train detection system and crossing control system) in the bungalow near the two adjacent crossings. No train was scheduled to pass through the area during his work — but he wasn’t aware that a train on one of the tracks was running nine minutes late and was actually approaching the crossing.

The maintainer tried to auto-calibrate the systems for each of two tracks and succeeded with one, but after 30-60 seconds, he got an error message for the other, according to his account in the report. Unbeknownst to him, the failed auto-calibration process on that track left the warning system deactivated. Before the system prompted him to try again, he noticed that the crossing gate at Old Sudbury Road had gone down, but not the one on Route 117. Realizing a train was approaching, he moved to open the manual control box for the crossing gate but then saw that the train was almost at the crossing, so “I started waving my hands to try to stop traffic as quickly as I could.”

The train conductor saw Yeats’s car and applied the brakes about 60 feet before reaching the Old Sudbury Road crossing. The vehicle immediately behind Yeats was able to stop just in time.

Until the issue was corrected, trains approaching both crossings as well as the one at Tower Road were required to slow to 30 miles per hour, blow their horn, and be prepared to stop. The speed restriction was lifted at 6:09 p.m.

Yeats later learned that a friend of her daughter’s was two cars behind hers and reported what he saw to the police. “He said it was deafening, the squealing of the brakes… [and the maintainer] was running with his hands up in the air towards the train freaking out.”

The investigation found that the maintainer had not informed the dispatcher that he was about to do maintenance at the crossing, that he had never seen the “calibration fail” error, and was not up to date on his training. Investigators recommended improving training, ensuring that auto-calibration work automatically triggers the fail-safe system, and requiring maintainers to notify the dispatcher to verify that there are no approaching trains before they begin work (“begging the obvious question, why is it a new protocol?” Higgins commented at the Select Board meeting). The maintainer was terminated the day after the incident.

However, Lincoln officials also gave credit to Keolis officials after meeting with them. “They took immediate action, they involved the right people, they followed the right protocol to ensure safety” in the immediate aftermath of the incident, Higgins said. 

“They took ownership of it — they weren’t trying to skirt the issue, they were very up front with it,” Kennedy said.

Higgins and Kennedy asked in their meetings with Keolis if the cause of the near-miss was the same as that for an accident in January in which a woman in Wilmington was killed when a train hit her car while crossing the tracks when the gates were up. Keolis said that accident happened because a maintainer deactivated the warning system but forgot to reactivate it before leaving for another assignment, Higgins said.

According to a February 24 WBUR story about the aftermath of that accident, new procedures and requirements were stipulated for when work was done involving roadway crossings. Going forward, “dispatchers would have to get affirmation from the signal maintainer that the system was enabled [and] the maintainer must also remain on location to ensure the system functions properly when the next train passes and, if necessary, deploy it manually,” the story says. It’s unclear when these requirements were actually put in place.

Since the incident, Yeats said she’s been “researching up a storm” and meeting with Higgins and Kennedy to learn more about what happened. “I want to say how much I appreciate all of their time and support, and their commitment to understanding why this happened. It’s clear that public safety is their top priority and they’ve been doing everything possible to work with Keolis and the MBTA to get the answers we deserve and to get an action plan put in place so this never happens again,” she said last week.

Still, the effects linger. Her daughter has had dreams about being stuck at a crossing with a train coming, and Yeats herself feels anxious every time she hears a train passing through.

“It used to be a nice background noise… I used to enjoy it,” said Yeats, who lives within earshot of the railroad tracks.

Yeats continues to drive over the crossing almost every day, “but I have a very new way of going over that track,” she said. She knows the commuter rail schedule, “and I look at my clock before I get to the train tracks and I look between the trees… I definitely have a lot of built-in mechanisms now.”