Chairman Robert Sumwalt said at a press conference that the implementation of Positive Train Control (PTC), which automatically decreases the speed of a train traveling over the limit, could have prevented the collision that left two people dead and dozens of others injured.
Railroads across the country have until the end of 2018 to enact the costly safety feature.
NTSB said its investigators had arrived to the scene in South Carolina to probe the accident, which occurred when an Amtrak train collided with a freight train.
Amtrak said its train was traveling to Miami from New York when it collided with the freight train, killing two Amtrak employees.
The Sunday collision follows two other deadly Amtrak train crashes in the last two months. Three people were killed in Washington state in December when a speeding train derailed while traveling across a highway overpass. NTSB in its probe found that PTC would have slowed down that train. The latest crash also comes several days after a train carrying Republican lawmakers to the annual GOP retreat collided with a truck in Virginia, killing one of the vehicle’s passengers. The NTSB is conducting investigations into both the Washington and Virginia crashes.
