ENGINEER DISTRACTION. A search of telephone company records confirms that a Los Angeles commuter train engineer was exchanging text messages (with some young train enthusiasts?) just before the fatal collision with a freight train. Unauthorized use of cell phones by train crews is not unknown on Metrolink.

A Metrolink official said an engineer on another commuter rail train was suspended for sending text messages about the time of the crash.

The Federal Railroad Administration has set hand and seal to a ukase banning train crews from using (personal?) cell phones.

In issuing the order, the Railroad Administration noted that rail workers are increasingly using cell phones and other electronic devices that could distract them at critical moments during railroad operations.

It noted six train accidents, four of them resulting in deaths, between 2000 and 2006 in which cell phone use was involved.

"These obviously unsafe practices reflect the powerful influence of pervasive use of cell phones and other electronic and electrical devices," the report said.

While most railroads prohibit or restrict use of electronic devices by rail workers on duty, the Railroad Administration said the rules have not proved effective in preventing train accidents.

Wireless phones provide an extra means of communication among engineers, conductors and dispatchers in the event of a radio failure, but Metrolink decided to prohibit cell phones outright in the locomotive cabin, said Keith Millhouse, vice chairman of the regional rail system's board of director.

That last paragraph illustrates the trade-off of any regulation. Railroad radios do break, locomotives go on the road with bad-order radios, the dispatcher is sometimes distracted. I can think of at least one trip on which I monitored an engineer using a cell phone to raise a dispatcher. (That it was an expected Amtrak arrival ON TIME at an interlocking suggests indiscipline somewhere.)

As an aside, note what happens when a reporter doesn't understand railroads. Locomotive cabin?

Safety is of the first importance in the discharge of duty.

"For me, it just gives me heart palpitations thinking about it," said Tim Smith, a former train engineer and California chairman of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen, the union that represented Sanchez. "The last thing you want to be doing is something that takes your eyes off the road."

True enough. On the other hand, a relatively routine job, which a scheduled passenger train is, does not present the day-to-day different challenges that keep the adrenaline flowing, and make crew exhaustion a problem during the busy season. Years ago, I went with some friends exploring the Chicago Transit Authority. On the Ravenswood, we had the opportunity to observe a motorman who could operate the train and read the Sun-Times (in its convenient tabloid format) at the same time. That's a clear breach of the rules, but our man had no doubt developed some muscle memory in repeated trips on the line to be able to get away with it.