The DuPont Derailment: An Inaugural Run Goes Wrong

On the morning of December eighteenth, twenty seventeen, at seven thirty-four, southbound Amtrak train five oh one rounded a curve on a newly built segment of track called the Point Defiance Bypass, south of DuPont, Washington. It was the train's inaugural run on the new route, which was meant to cut travel time between Seattle and Portland. The engineer was going nearly eighty miles per hour on a curve with a thirty-mile-per-hour speed limit.

The locomotive and most of the passenger cars left the rails. Several cars fell from an overpass onto Interstate Five below, landing on moving vehicles. Three passengers died. Fifty-seven people on the train were injured, along with eight motorists on the freeway.

The National Transportation Safety Board investigation, completed in twenty nineteen, was unsparing: the crash was preventable. The crew had received inadequate training on the new route. A safety technology called positive train control, which automatically slows trains approaching speed restrictions, had been installed on the locomotives but was not yet active on this segment of track. The railroad knew it was not active. The run was authorized anyway.

The damage to Amtrak equipment and the infrastructure below exceeded forty million dollars. Washington State and Sound Transit, which had jointly developed the bypass, faced years of litigation.

The derailment reopened a long-running debate about rail safety on the West Coast corridor. Positive train control was eventually activated across the network, a requirement that had been mandated by federal law since two thousand eight and repeatedly delayed by the railroads. The curve near DuPont was the place where the delay finally had a cost that could not be argued away.