The wheels of a Metro car that derailed, prompting a federal investigation and subsequent suspension of more than half of Metro’s fleet, had moved far beyond the transit agency’s standard for safety, according to preliminary findings released Wednesday by the National Transportation Safety Board.
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The NTSB said wheels on the 7000-series car that derailed Oct. 12 were found to have moved two inches apart from one another. Metro deems wheels that shift more than one-sixteenth of an inch to be unsafe.
The findings were accompanied by an NTSB safety alert that called for all transit and commuter rail systems across the country to check for wheels that have tilted from axles, a malfunction the federal agency said could threaten passenger safety.
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The revelations are the latest development challenging Metro at a time when it had been focused on luring back passengers amid a return to in-person work. The derailment has forced the agency to battle its biggest setback in six years while disrupting public transit across the Washington region.
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The safety board said its alert for other transit and commuter rail agencies is precautionary, adding that it knows of no other wheel defects similar to the one hounding Metro.
“We see a problem here,” NTSB spokesman Keith Holloway said. “We want to make sure there’s not a systemic problem elsewhere.”
Wheels on 7000-series cars are pressed to their axles with 65 to 95 tons of force to avoid shifts beyond one-sixteenth of an inch. Wheels on their axles should remain 53-5/16 inches apart, Metro officials say.
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Russell Quimby, a railroad accident consultant who worked as an NTSB investigator for more than two decades, said he does not know of another case in which wheels shifted as far as what the NTSB found on the Metro car.
“I’ve never heard of such a thing,” he said.
NTSB begins investigation into Metro derailment that prompted evacuations
The National Transportation Safety Board began its investigation Oct. 12 when a Blue Line train slipped off the tracks, prompting the evacuation of 187 passengers. The investigation revealed that one of the car’s wheelsets — an axle and two connected wheels — suffered from a defect that caused the wheels to move outward. Investigators learned Metro mechanics had been finding the problem since 2017 within the agency’s latest model of rail car.
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Built by Kawasaki Rail Car, the 7000-series cars began showing signs of the defect two years after the first batch of cars were delivered to Metro. The defect appeared twice during routine 90-day inspections in 2017. Inspections in subsequent years uncovered similarly small numbers of the defects, leading transit agency officials to believe the problem was isolated.
But this year, Metro inspections found 18 cases of the defect before the derailment put a spotlight on the growing problem.
Emergency inspections by Metro and the NTSB after the derailment found about 20 more cases, prompting the Washington Metrorail Safety Commission to order Metro to pull all 7000-series cars from service on Oct. 17.
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The suspension of the 748 cars has forced Metro to operate its rail system with heavily scaled-back service and long waits, with the agency using only about a quarter of its roughly 1,200-car fleet.
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The NTSB safety alert that accompanied its Metro findings follows a Federal Transit Administration safety alert that took effect Nov. 1, which recommended all public transportation systems inspect wheels and axles on their cars. The FTA also ordered the nation’s transit agencies to submit records of any rail cars with wheels that have loosened or tilted.
The FTA said in a statement that responses to its order were due Wednesday, and the agency is reviewing them as they arrive.
Federal Transit Administration orders transit agencies’ inspection records after Metro derailment
The NTSB’s alert called on rail transit agencies to do similar assessments, but also recommended that commuter railroad systems — such as MARC in Maryland and the Virginia Railway Express do the same. Maryland Department of Transportation spokeswoman Brittany Marshall said the agency is reviewing the NTSB safety alert. A message from The Washington Post to the VRE was not returned.
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“The Safety Alert identifies the issue of wheelset movement on transit rail cars and commuter railroads as a serious problem that has the potential to create a catastrophic event,” Robert Hall, director of the NTSB’s Office of Railroad, Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Investigations, said in a statement.
Metro spokesman Ian Jannetta said Metro already has inspected its entire fleet for the defect.
“We have no reason to believe wheelset issues extend beyond the 7000-series fleet,” Jannetta said.
The wheel defect is progressive and appears after an unknown number of miles, making it hard to predict, investigators have said.
The NTSB’s preliminary findings did not point to any cause for the malfunction, and the safety board said it is now focusing its investigation on a “failure analysis” of the wheelsets, the response from rail traffic controllers to the derailment, oversight of Metrorail and any similar wheelset issues on other passenger rail cars that might surface.
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Quimby said the NTSB’s findings could point to wheels being pressed onto axles with inadequate pressure.
“The only reason the wheels would move like that on an axle would be if they weren’t pressed on correctly or with not enough pressure,” he said.
Kawasaki Rail Car subcontracted with Sumitomo Metals to supply the wheels and axles, and with ORX to assemble the wheelset by pressing the wheels onto the axles, the NTSB said. Messages from The Post to the companies were not returned Wednesday.
The safety board report also included damage estimates to the derailed car, which investigators say slipped off tracks twice before the final derailment. Damage amounted to $715,000, or about one-third of the cost of the car.
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The order sidelining Metro’s 7000-series cars — issued by the safety commission, an independent agency Congress created to monitor Metrorail safety after years of lapses — allows transit officials to resume using cars without the defect if Metro can show the commission it can do so without risking passenger safety.
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Metro is proposing to speed up inspections of every car from 90 days to eight days to catch the first signs of the defect.
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Last month, Metro began testing that hypothesis on two out-of-service 7000-series trains carrying weighted boxes to simulate passengers. Jannetta said the trains have completed that initial testing.
“We will determine next steps based upon analysis and feedback from [the safety commission], which may include additional data collection activities,” he said.
Wheelset inspections of Metro railcars require precision and time, Metro says
If Metro’s wheel screening process is successful, the transit agency will send its results to the safety commission and request the release of all cars unaffected by the defect. Transit officials have said they do not expect the 7000-series to be reinstated before the end of the year.