Fort Totten Metro Crash Investigation What's Next?

The National Transportation Safety Board has been working closely with WMATA and two private companies that designed and manufactured the train automatic control components, to determine what went wrong, why and where. In theory this will serve to alert Metro to potential existing risk areas and also perhaps to illuminate what triggered the train detection malfunctions.

A sight distance test was also performed on Saturday July 18, 2009. This was an effort to examine post-accident rail markings and use them as a means to look at information concerning the striking train. This information would include braking characteristics and speed as derived from the Metro operations control center.

Presumably these phases of the investigation will assist NTSB and Metro in coming up with better back-up systems in case of signal failures in the future.