The Amtrak 188 Derailment and the $265 Million Fund for Its Victims

On the night of May 12, 2015, Amtrak Train 188, a Northeast Regional bound for New York, pulled out of Philadelphia's 30th Street Station. Minutes later, in the Port Richmond section of the city, it reached a curve where the posted limit was 50 miles per hour. The train was traveling at 106. It jumped the rails. Cars overturned and broke apart. Eight passengers were killed and more than 200 were injured, some of them catastrophically.

Federal investigators traced the cause to the speed entering the curve. The engineer, Brandon Bostian, had accelerated moments earlier and, by some accounts, was distracted by radio reports that another train had been struck by a rock. The stretch of track lacked the automatic speed-control system that could have slowed the train before it entered the turn. The crash ranked among the deadliest passenger rail disasters in the Northeast in years.

The lawsuits that followed were scattered and difficult to manage. Sixty-four separate cases were filed across six federal court jurisdictions, each brought by an injured passenger or by the family of someone who died. Coordinating them fell to a committee of plaintiffs' attorneys. Thomas R. Kline of Kline & Specter chaired that effort and led the negotiations with Amtrak on behalf of the victims as a group.

One legal limit shaped everything. Under federal law, Amtrak's total liability for a single accident was capped, and for years that ceiling had stood at $200 million. After this crash, Congress raised it, and Amtrak agreed not to contest applying the higher figure retroactively. That created room for a recovery larger than the old cap would have permitted.

In October 2016, U.S. District Judge Legrome D. Davis approved a $265 million settlement. The figure was not any single client's award. It was an aggregate fund, the money Amtrak would pay to resolve every claim arising from the derailment, to be divided among the many passengers and families who came forward. Kline & Specter represented a number of those victims.

Rather than fight one another for shares of a fixed pool, the attorneys built a non-adversarial process. Two court-appointed masters would hear each victim's losses and set individual compensation, with Amtrak agreeing not to challenge the claims. The committee lawyers gave up the extra fees they could have charged so that more of the fund reached the injured. Claimants had until November 21, 2016 to join the settlement, and Amtrak was ordered to pay it in full by February 28, 2017.