When a Regional Transportation District light rail train ran off the tracks in southeast Denver last year, agency officials issued public service alerts calling it a “disabled train” and, 14 months later, still use that term to describe what happened.
But state regulatory documents show the derailment occurred after a steel wheel broke apart and that, after the train operator radioed supervisors, the crippled train kept rolling through RTD’s Yale Station before stopping near Hampden Avenue where tracks dip ahead of an overpass.
Train wheel failures can be deadly, as seen in 1998 near Hanover, Germany, where a crack in steel caused a high-speed train to derail and crash into an overpass, which collapsed, killing 101 people.
The RTD investigation of its Jan. 24, 2024, derailment and a subsequent Colorado Public Utilities Commision corrective action plan have not been made public. Neither have the investigations of other light rail derailments, including two in Aurora in 2019 and 2022 along the same curving stretch of track where multiple passengers were injured and a woman’s leg was severed.
RTD’s total 97 bus and train crashes in 2024 included a record seven train derailments, more than during the previous two years combined, according to RTD records obtained by The Denver Post under a Colorado Open Records Act legal petition. Over the past six years, an annual average of 113 RTD trains and buses crashed, a rate of one every 3.2 days.
The public should be better informed about the cause of derailments under a new law — signed last month by Gov. Jared Polis — requiring the PUC to make RTD light rail accident investigations public if it would protect safety and health. PUC officials are tasked with implementing the law.
Meanwhile, Denver-based civil engineer Richard Bamber, who worked on the construction of the RTD’s rail transit system, is warning that the deterioration of RTD’s tracks — a problem that forced agency managers to impose safety “slow zones” where trains run at 10 miles per hour – could make wheels wear out faster. A founder of the public transit advocacy group Greater Denver Transit, Bamber said that if the RTD isn’t replacing worn-out steel wheels frequently enough, rider safety could be compromised.
“We have had at least one wheel fail, and things don’t normally fail in isolation. That’s why they need to check everything,” Bamber said.
“Did this wheel fail due to a manufacturing defect? Or did it fail because inspections and maintenance were not adequate? In both cases, the problem would affect multiple train wheels. Safety-first logic says you should treat the systemic problem and not the incident in isolation.”
RTD officials weren’t available to discuss train derailments and didn’t answer questions about whether changes were made after the wheel failure.
The RTD “will comply with the changes in state law and any regulations that are issued by the PUC,” agency spokeswoman Tina Jaquez said.
Derailments
None of the RTD’s seven train derailments in 2024 led to passenger or operator injuries. One of them happened when a vehicle hit a train, knocking its wheels off the tracks, Jaquez said in an email.
The Jan. 24, 2024, derailment just north of RTD’s Southmoor Station “resulted in a disabled train,” she said, repeating the language used in public service alert announcements while crews cleared tracks.
A required June 6 RTD staff report to the PUC summarizing accidents described the derailment: The light rail train “began shedding wheel/tire components and eventually experienced a catastrophic failure of one wheel/tire assembly and derailed,” the report said.
A separate PUC document refers to the undisclosed corrective action plan and says the train operator detected trouble and radioed a control supervisor, asking about possible train mechanical problems, yet “continued southbound from Colorado to Yale Station with significant performance issues.” Then, the train “experienced catastrophic failure of one wheel/tire assembly. Another tire was also affected.”
PUC recommendations included metal testing to determine whether the wheel was defective, giving train operators more leeway to stop without authorization from supervisors when they face potentially unsafe situations, reviewing RTD practices in getting rid of worn wheels, creating a standardized wheel procurement process, and increasing rail grinding (smoothing out bumps) on tracks.
In 2022, an RTD employee’s detection of corroded tracks downtown led to a PUC corrective action plan and eventual RTD toughening of inspections in line with industry standards — weekly inspections on foot or in a vehicle that moves slowly enough along tracks to allow accurate assessment of wear and tear. RTD began stepped-up inspections, leading to the imposition of the slow zones that have delayed transit for nine months.
Train wheels
If Colorado’s new law had been in place last year, metro Denver riders might have learned about the derailments and their causes, Bamber said. Around the country, other public transit agencies also need to know about problems to prevent disasters, he said, referring to the Federal Aviation Administration and National Transportation Safety Board systems for investigating aviation incidents and making preliminary and final reports public.
“If the RTD was finding problems, would you want to know? Would you want to read the accident investigation reports? That’s what this current secrecy prevents,” he said.
After the Aurora derailments, RTD officials determined that light rail operators were at fault.
State lawmakers crack down
Colorado’s new accident investigation reform law may not apply to past light rail crash incidents, depending on the regulations the PUC must adopt to implement the law.
State Sen. Faith Winter, one of the legislative leaders who pushed it through, said lawmakers have been talking with PUC officials and are confident that the agency will implement the law effectively.
If the RTD crashes and derailments expose problems, transparency will be crucial to prevent disasters and improve public transit, Winter, a Broomfield Democrat, said. “Seeing how those flaws are fixed adds to the greater trust of the public in our transit systems,” she said.
“It is essential to have this information and make the reports public so that we can establish what the corrective solutions are. Is it a tire problem? Is it the angle of that specific curve? Was it a driver issue? Without having access to the reports, we don’t know. And that leads to a lot of questioning about public safety.”