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Amtrak derailment death toll rises to eight
and the Boehner want to still cut amtraks funding.
Maybe he’d support additional funding if the trains ran on ethanol. That’s the way Congress operates these days with the current special interest “followthedollarsship”. They’re certainly not showing leadership for the country’s best interests.
What does speeding have to do with funding?
Roger Cole, No money for Amtrak for systems to prevent it. It has everything to do with it. Amtrak is an economic loss leader for the NE, like it or not. If Amtrak were to disappear so would what is left of the economy of WV.
The only reason the Repiblicans want to cut funding to Amtrak is because they’re in cahoots with the automakers of the world. It’s the General Motors streetcar conspiracy all over again.
There is a graphic in the NYT today showing median speeds and the speed of this train. From that and the other information in the news my hypothesis - and it is only a hypothesis - is loss of situational awareness. It is my suspicion that the engineer thought he was past the speed restriction and that his next move was open it up. If correct this is a very stupid reason to have cost eight people their lives, but it is also one of the leading causes of passenger airliner crashes. CFIT (controlled flight into terrain) is more common that we would like to believe.
My condolences to the families of the people killed in this crash, and my best wishes for a speedy recovery to all those who were injured and survived.
I just have to ask this question: most freight railroads have two crew members in the locomotive, passenger trains just have the engineer in the locomotive and a conductor somewhere back in the train. It just escapes common sense why you would not have two crew members in the locomotive carrying passengers. This accident, if it was caused by the engineer falling asleep, being distracted, whatever…could have been prevented had there been another crew member in the locomotive to to make the engineer aware of the speed violation. Does anyone know how this practice came into being?
Why is there no investigation or comment in the new releases from the NTSB regarding the two points of shattered glass in the locomotive engineer’s windshield? Maybe the engineer head caused one shatter but why TWO? There sure was an excessive number of government people standing around at the site but none of their photos showed any investigation at the point the train left the track. Whenever you want to find the cause of the derailment you look for and find the marks on the railheads where the wheels came off the track, and then you look for marks of any kind preceding that location.
I think it is very interesting and important that the SEPTA engineer on the previous train passing this location was hit in the windshield with a projectile (was that a gunshot bullet?) which shattered his windshield and the news report said the passengers were bused to destination, indicating the train was then disabled. Why did police not flood the brush area where the SEPTA train was hit and find the attacker? They could have prevented this wreck, but that is more police action.
It is just distant speculation but could the engineer of train #188 have been shocked at a moment his windshield was shattered by being shot at, and caused him to push the throttle up, the run-to get away reaction, and then lose his mind on of his location of the 50 MPH curve? One passenger said he felt the train was moving 65 MPH when the recorder tapes now say he was moving 106 in the 80 MPH first curve. This may have been a terrorist attack taking place against the government who owns Amtrak. That is not the kind of press report the present media would print.
Of all the location which needed a speed control signal system, why was this curve not the first place to receive the new cab signal speed control? This is just like the management failure on Metro-North, where they failed to have the curve speed restriction included in the cab signal control system. And it only took one week to make that improvement
Republicans are not friends of UAW/O’Bamamotors.
G B James: I am uncomfortable with the whole idea of having a lone engineer in the cab of a freight or passenger train. A second crewman could have prevented Chatsworth, Spuyten Duyvil, and this incident. I rarely agree with the unions, but they are right on two-person crews. I cringe when I see a lone engineer board the ‘Empire Builder’, in Shelby, MT, for the 9:39/535-mile run to Minot, ND. A second person, in the cab, is cheap insurance…
I have a technical question. I’ve noticed in both of the high speed on a curve derailment tragedies (Spuyten Duyval and Frankford Junction) that the engineer applied the emergency brakes just before the train left the tracks. It is common knowledge that a car driver slamming on the brakes (at least in the days before automatic braking systems) while traveling too fast on a curve will likely skid off the road. What I don’t know is whether the forces generated by putting a train into emergency on a curve make it more or less likely that the wheels will go off the rails.
Has anyone ever done such a study?
To follow up on my suspicions in prior post, another posting on Trains Newswire says a SEPTA engineer behind the Train #188 heard the engineer of Train #188 radio report that he was being shot at. This radio transmission should be made public to show what caused this terrible accident. Sounds like terrorist attack to me.
We don’t yet know if a gun shot or thrown projectile contributed to this accident and it may be a long time before we do. The NTSB has to be given time to do their job. If this is the case, it could be ant-government or anti-Amtrak terrorism as some have suggested, or just common crime, such as kids who thought it would be fun to through rocks at trains and may never have thought it would cause something like this.
I haven’t heard anything about any gun shots, I read that he can’t recall the accident. I had a friend in a motorcycle accident who couldn’t remember his accident, he had to be told what had happened by other people who witness the accident. I think that the NTSB will look at fatigue because in many aircraft accident involved fatigue. The railroad don’t have set times to work all though I don’t know about Amtrak. Most railroad engineers don’t work day’s, swings, grave shift only. The question will be why:was he going 100 + in to 50 mph turn, he must know the route. It shouldn’t be the first time he experience this run by himself and didn’t know what to expect.