I agree that litigation these days goes too far, but if one can show that a company or organization failed to take reasonable precautions to prevent an accident, especially for monetary reasons, it's hard to argue they shouldn't be punished montarily.

In this case, 2 people in the cab are almost universal in railroads around the country and the world, for this exact reason. Yet Metrolink and several other communter rails, have cut back to only one.

Second, the automatic stop system is almost universal around the world where passenger traffic is in danger of head-ons such as this. However, automatic stops are fairly rare in the U.S. so they might be able to get away with that one.

Any reasonable person can assume that bad things could happen should the one and only engineer be disabled and to not have even the most basic safety precautions in place in that event is pretty neglegent in my opinion.

Then again, railroads are heavily regulated and Metrolink and the contractor were following FRA regulations, which apparently only require one person on the cab of a commuter and no ATS systems, so maybe the solution/punishiment is nothing more than revamping those regulations.

As far as the engineer himself, everyone makes mistakes and in this case, it only took a few seconds of potentially being distracted and looking in the wrong direction (if this is what happened) to cause this accident. He paid with his life and even if he lived, I would say the worst that should happen is the loss of his job. To me there's a difference between a very simple mistake in extraordinary circumstances, and gross neglegence, such as drinking or doing drugs on the job.

Any one of us could look away for a split second at the radio or something we dropped on the floor while driving and kill someone, it happens all the time to good poeple. But drinking and driving is certainly different.