NTSB: Amtrak engineer wasn't using cellphone during derailment

The Amtrak engineer driving Train 188 when it crashed last month in Frankford, killing eight and injuring more than 200, was not using his cellphone during or before the deadly derailment, the National Transportation Safety Board announced this morning.

In the days after the crash, the NTSB found that the train was traveling at 106 mph - more than twice the posted speed limit at the curve in the tracks where the train derailed.

Investigators found no problems or malfunctions with the signals systems, the NTSB has also said. That leaves speed and a lack of proactive safety technology as the primary problems NTSB investigators have uncovered so far. Several passengers have filed lawsuits focusing on the train's speed, as well as Amtrak's failure to implement mandated technology such as Positive Train Control in the area where the crash occurred.

On the cellphone scrutiny, the NTSB said: "To determine whether the phone was in 'airplane mode' or was powered off, investigators in the NTSB laboratory in Washington have been examining the phone's operating system, which contains more than 400,000 files of meta-data. Investigators are obtaining a phone identical to the engineer's phone as an exemplar model and will be running tests to validate the data."

Analysis of Bostian's phone records was complicated because the phone carrier has multiple systems that log different types of phone activity, some that are based in different time zones, the NTSB explained. "Investigators worked with the phone carrier to validate the timestamps in several sets of records with activity from multiple time zones to correlate them all to the time zone in which the accident occurred, Eastern Daylight Time," the agency said in a prepared statement posted to its website this morning.

Bostian gave the NTSB his phone's passcode, enabling investigators to access his data without going through the phone manufacturer, the NTSB added.

Attorney Bob Mongeluzzi, who has filed a federal lawsuit on behalf of several passengers injured in the crash, said the NTSB's most recent findings raise "even more questions into why he would recklessly operate this train at an outrageously dangerous speed. Nothing about the NTSB's conclusions today changes the fact that the engineer's actions were inexcusable as were the deliberate decisions of Amtrak to not implement available life-saving automatic train control systems."

Two crash passengers remain hospitalized at Temple University Hospital, spokesman Jeremy Walter said.

The NTSB's investigation is expected to last a year.