Federal investigators say the train was travelling at 80mph (129km/h) in a 30mph zone. Bella Dinh-Zarr, a National Transportation Safety Board member, said at a news conference on Monday night that the event data recorder in the rear locomotive provided information about the train’s speed.
Dinh-Zarr said it was not yet known what caused the train to derail and that “it’s too early to tell” why it was going so fast. She said it was likely that federal investigators would be on the scene for a week or more.
Eighty passengers and five on-duty crew were on board when the train derailed and 13 carriages fell off the tracks. As well as the three confirmed deaths, more than 70 people needed medical care, including 10 with serious injuries.
Aleksander Kristiansen, a 24-year-old passenger from Copenhagen, said he had been in the bathroom when the crash occurred and he had been thrown to the ground. When he stood up, the train was shaking, he said.
“I didn’t believe it happened when it happened,” he said.
Kristiansen, who was in Seattle for an exchange programme, said his train car had stopped on a steep embankment, and that he had got out from the back of the car and helped others out.
First responders spent hours searching the train cars, some of which were not safe to enter as they continued to dangle off the overpass.
The new route, which was built to speed up local services, launched on Monday “after weeks of inspection and testing”, officials said.
A track chart from the Washington state department of transportation shows the maximum speed drops from 79mph to 30mph for passenger trains just before the tracks curve to cross the Interstate 5 highway, which is where the train went off the tracks.
The chart, dated 7 February 2017, was submitted to the Federal Railroad Administration in anticipation of the start of passenger services along the new bypass route, which shaves 10 minutes off the trip between Seattle and Portland.
The Washington state governor, Jay Inslee, declared a state of emergency and visited the scene on Monday. He emphasised that the cause of the crash remained unknown.
“There are four things we need to do: express compassion for these families, respect first responders, stay off [Interstate 5] and suspend judgment. No one knows what happened in this incident.”
Amtrak’s co-chief executive, Richard Anderson, told reporters on Monday he would not speculate on the cause of the derailment and said safety was the company’s top priority.
However, Anderson acknowledged that a working Positive Train Control (PTC) sysyem, which automatically slows trains if they are going too fast, had not been installed on that stretch of track. PTC also prevents train-on-train collisions and stops a train from passing through misaligned tracks.
Last month the NTSB chairman, Robert Sumwalt, issued a scathing critique of Amtrak’s culture, saying a future breakdown was likely.
Sumwalt said: “Amtrak’s safety culture is failing and is primed to fail again, until and unless Amtrak changes the way it practices safety management.”
Congress had mandated the implementation of PTC nationwide by the end of 2015, then extended that deadline until the end of 2018 after finding installation was more difficult than anticipated.
“Every year we wait in implementing PTC to its full extent, more people are going to be killed,” Dinh-Zarr told CNN on Tuesday.
In 2015, the NTSB calculated PTC would have prevented 145 train accidents, saved 300 lives and avoided 6,700 injuries had it been in place since 1969.
Investigators have said speeding was to blame, at least in part, for a number of recent crashes, including one in 2015 in Philadelphia that killed eight people.
Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat, said on Tuesday that PTC was “needed now”.
“Why was Amtrak train traveling at nearly TRIPLE the speed limit before fatal derailment?” Blumenthal asked in a Twitter post. “Positive Train Control might have prevented this disaster and saved lives.”
Earlier this year the Trump administration proposed ending subsidies for Amtrak to operate long-distance train service, cutting $630m of the $1.4bn in annual government support for passenger rail service. Those cuts were rejected by Congress.
“There is a money issue, because while Congress mandated the implementation of PTC on the railroads, they didn’t give any money for it, so it is self-funded,” said Allan Zarembski, an engineering expert at the University of Delaware. He added the caveat that US funding for Amtrak covers its capital programs.
“For commuter agencies, it falls on the local governments to fund them,” he said.
A few hours after the crash, Donald Trump cited it as a reason to support his infrastructure plan, tweeting: “The train accident that just occurred in DuPont, WA shows more than ever why our soon to be submitted infrastructure plan must be approved quickly. Seven trillion dollars spent in the Middle East while our roads, bridges, tunnels, railways (and more) crumble! Not for long!”
Ten minutes later, he tweeted: “Thoughts and prayers are with everyone involved.”
