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During rescue activities on the day of the accident, an Amtrak representative provided the incident commander with a partial passenger and crew list and told him that about 200 people were on board. A list compiled later the next day showed 207 people The delay in providing an exact count caused problems because the incident commander had to assign personnel to spend a day counting tickets to help develop a passenger list In addition, emergency responders did not know when to discontinue rescue operations because the count changed frequently The railroad was not aware that three infants were on board because they were not ticketed If Amtrak had issued nonrevenue tickets for the infants, they would have been included on the passenger list.

The Safety Board concludes that emergency responders were at a disadvantage because they were unable to obtain an adequate passenger and crew list from Amtrak until the next day The Safety Board believes Amtrak needs to improve its passenger and crew count procedures so that accurate passenger lists can be furnished to local authorities with minimum delay

Each locomotive unit was equipped with an event recorder. The lead locomotive unit (819) had a Pulse Electronics solid-state memory unit, and the two trailing locomotives (262 and 312) had Bach-Simpson paper-strip chart speed recorders Locomotive 819's solid-state memory unit did not sustain significant damage due to impact, but large amounts of mud and water were found inside its enclosure, which was not watertight Data for the period from 12-43 a m. on September 22 until the time of the accident could not be recovered from 819's event recorder because of fluid immersion-induced corrosion, electrolysis of the power pins on some battery-backed memory devices, or both. The paper recording media from locomotives 262 and 312, although slightly damaged by moisture, were legible and provided time, speed, and distance data from New Orleans to the accident site.

The data recovered from the paper recording media on the two trailing locomotive units indicated that the Sunset Limited's speed at the time of the derailment was about 72 mph. Because of the water damage to 819's Pulse Electronics unit, important data about the train's operation in the 2 hours prcceding the derailment could not be recovered. When functioning properly, such a unit records the following information that is often vital to accident investigation date and time, drive wheel rotations, traction motor current (load amps), automatic brake pressure, throttle position, horn (on/off), cab signal acknowledgement (on/off), PCS OPEN (open/closed), independent and dynamic brakes (on/off, and alerter and brake valve cutouts (on/off).

The Safety Board has investigated other accidents in which event recorder data were lost 55