USA: The Federal Railroad Admonistration issued an Emergency Order on October 2 prohibiting railroad crew members from using any private electronic communications devices in locomotive or control cabs.
The order followed the release of preliminary information from the National Transportation Safety Board the previous day which indicated that the Metrolink driver killed on the head-on collision at Chatsworth on September 12 had sent a text message from his mobile phone 22 sec before the impact, which killed 25 people and injured 135.
According to NTSB, Robert M Sanchez sent or received 57 text messages while on duty the day of the crash, although the agency said it was still determining '...the precise timing and correlation of these events' and that its investigation was far from complete. Cell phone use by crew members on duty, whether voice or text, was already strictly prohibited by Metrolink regulations.
