Never is good for them. Is never good for you? Ed
I think are approaching a policy shift whereby no public accident reports will be issued because the information will be deemed too sensitive for public disclosure. It will be considered to be proprietary business information.
Along the lines of individual #1 not wanting to be investigated?
+1
+2
I mean along the lines of the industry and the NTSB feeling that the public has no right to know what caused a wreck, and they they have no duty to inform the public about any of the details. Also, the industry would prefer to not make the details public because it is bad publicity for them.
I think that at one time, the NTSB, being a public sector institution, had the duty to inform the public and that it helped justify their existance as a public sector instution. The public is paying the bill, so they should receive the work product. That kind of humble reasoning has gone out the window lately.
If the NTSB felt a strong obligation to inform the public, they would do so in a timely manner.
Along the lines of Individual #1 feeling anything he or his governmental agencies do should be hidden from public scrutiny? That is not the US way.
Most of the ~400 employees of the NTSB are civil servants but the five board of directors are appointed by the President and confirmed by the US Senate for five-year terms. The current chair was appointed by the current #1, originally named to the board by Bush 43. The vice chair and one other member were named by the current #1. There is one vacancy (no surprise there). Whatever influence on policy the board has can probably be traced to the current #1.
What I speculate above has nothing to do with Individual #1. Instead, it is related to the growing detachment from the concept that the public institutions work for us.
Policies of appointees are obviously a function of the politics of the appointer. The current #1 merely follows in an acceleration of devaluing government as it once was, starting with #40’s “Government IS the problem” notion. #1’s views were influenced by an anti-governmentalist, deconstructionist advisor.
We’re getting close to getting this thread locked or deleted.
The final report is at least 2/3’s complete. Here is a recent update posted on the NTSB’s website back on December 13, 2018: https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/pages/rrd18mr001.aspx
The final report will be delivered to the Board in a public meeting to be held in 2019.
Amtrak to test trains at Point Defiance Bypass this weekend, 3 years after deadly derailment
Amtrak will run test trains on January 16 and 17, between 8 a.m. and 4 p.m.
As we read this, reports of the tests should be coming in.
Nosferatu Jr. did not particularly impress me as the ‘face’ of the revised safety and service effort.
I am particularly interested in the revised procedures in the last two miles to the ‘dead man’s curve’ location. They note that PTC will be fully in force, and they showed a brief cut of a couple of legacy speedboards as they noted something about better warning, but I’m interested in seeing if a proper distant and home indication has been provided in conjunction with the PTC and if proper alternative procedure is in place and tested for the times when – not if – the PTC is down.
If the 2017 engineer had situational awareness in the first place the incident would not have happened. He did not have sufficient qualifications for the route and thought he did and did not exercise awareness of his surroundings.
The ominous thing to me is that I don’t see evidence of the ‘cultural change’ that should have followed that wreck and the vast shortcomings in training, planning, and professional ethics it revealed.
That said, it has to be remembered that a simple pair of lighted signals in proper locations with proper aspects would very likely have prevented the accident, just as functional PTC as required by law would have.
Railroads don’t use signalling to enforece speeds. Signalling is used to show the condition of the track segment(s) ahead of the train.
But distant and home signals only very peripherally involve speed. In this particular case the issue was adequate fixed warning at night of a very, very serious fixed obstruction, as dangerous as any drawbridge or crossing at grade. In my extremely unhumble opinion, no one but morons terminate a 79mph stretch at a hard 35mph curve, over a well-trafficked highway, with only incidental signals. (It could be argued, and I would in fact so argue, that merely having such a combination of fixed speeds is ‘asking for it’.
And you would argue, what? That the condition of the track segment ahead of that train was undesirable to indicate clearly at night?
OM: I think the valid point you are trying to ascertain is whether there is some sort of back up to a faulty PTC or a way to positively warn an engineer who is not exercising proper attention? Human failures happen. That’s why mechanisms have been sought and used for years for mitigation.