MOTORMAN TESTS POSITIVE FOR COCAINE

The motorman who was driving the subway train that derailed in Brooklyn
Tuesday night, injuring 95 people, tested positive for cocaine shortly
after the accident, transit officials said yesterday. The test results gave
no indication of when the motorman had used cocaine or of the amount of the
drug in his system at the time, so it was not known whether he was impaired
while driving the train.

But investigators said they thought it was unlikely that any of the
motorman's actions could have contributed to the derailment, which happened
in a tunnel south of the DeKalb Avenue station just before 10 p.m. as the
train was switching from one track to another.

Generally, the only way a train operator can cause a derailment is by
driving too fast through a switching area, transit officials said. In this
case, all indications were that the train, which had just pulled out of the
station, was traveling slowly. The train's conductor, who opens and closes
the doors and makes station announcements, tested negative for drug or
alcohol use, officials said.

Lawrence G. Reuter, the president of New York City Transit, said that the
motorman had been suspended and served with administrative charges that
seek his dismissal. Transit officials said he would probably not face
criminal charges, unless they concluded that his drug use was a
contributing factor in the derailment.

Agency officials said the motorman, a 23-year veteran whom they would not
identify, had tested negative for drugs and alcohol 10 times -- including
four random tests -- since 1991. That was the year periodic tests were
started by the agency, in the wake of a derailment at Union Square in which
a motorman who had been drinking fell asleep at the controls and caused his
train to jump the tracks, killing five passengers.

In the DeKalb Avenue accident, the third derailment in the transit system
this year, investigators are still unsure what caused the third car of the
eight-car B train to come off the tracks as it passed southbound over the
switch. The front of that car slammed into a dividing wall, yanking the
back of the second car off the rails and sending passengers throughout the
train flying into walls and one another. Several passengers received head
injuries, though none were life-threatening.

Officials from the New York State Public Transportation Safety Board and
the National Transportation Safety Board have completed their examination
of the switch and the tracks around it, and have moved on to examine the
cars of the train, which have been dismantled at a train yard near Coney
Island.

The derailment is especially puzzling because the eight stainless steel
cars that made up the train, built from 1986 to 1988, were among the newest
in the system. And the switch the train was passing over had been
refurbished in the mid-1980's and inspected in May. The track around the
switch had been inspected twice in the last four months, including once
with a special train car that used high-frequency sound waves to search for
hidden fissures in the metal.

"There is still no obvious cause for the derailment," said Al O'Leary, the
chief spokesman for New York City Transit. "The switch has not been ruled
out, the cars have not been ruled out, and everything is still being looked
at."

Investigators think that the last derailment, which occurred in April when
three cars of an uptown No. 5 train jumped the tracks, slightly injuring
nine passengers, was caused by a cracked rail. In January, a car on the
Staten Island Railway derailed when a piece of equipment under the train
broke. There were no injuries in that incident.

Three derailments in six months are a cause of some concern to the
Metropolitan Transportation Authority, especially after years in which tens
of millions of dollars in capital improvements had led to many fewer such
accidents and to improvements in the breakdown rates of trains. There was,
by comparison, one minor derailment last year and one in 1998.

But transit officials say that even three derailments is a small number,
considering that subway trains make 7,000 trips a day, carrying more than
four million people.

They also sought yesterday to play down the test results for the motorman,
saying that the agency's positive rate for drugs or alcohol among its
workforce in 1998, the last year for which information is available, was
1.09 percent, and that the rate of positive tests was consistently among
the lowest in the country. The rate for train operators during 1998 was
0.39 percent, meaning that about 12 operators out of 3,000 tested positive.

Officials said that an employee with a positive test result would be
removed from the job and evaluated by a doctor to determine whether there
were any mitigating circumstances, like prescribed medication. In the case
of the motorman driving the DeKalb train, further tests determined there
were no irregularities with the results.