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Damage in Philadelphia Amtrak derailment estimated at $9.2 million
What if the man accused of planning attacks on Washington’s Metro System is the culprit for causing this derailment?
I do not & have never worked in the RR industry. Wether or not a/the (2nd?) person in this cab, could have prevented this accident, remains to be seen, but the thought of only having 1 person on an out-of yard train seems insane. 2 Humans, with alert eyeballs, will beat computers anytime.
In Australia, we had a rollover on a high speed passenger train in Queensland that was fitted with automatic train protection (but not operating) crewed by 2 drivers. These tragedies frequently involve a series of events all coming together the nature of which will come to light thru the investigative process but there is no doubt on a high speed, high capacity rail corridor some form of advanced safety management system should have been in place years ago. ATP ad their like have been around for decades
I still call this wreck ENGINEER ERROR (or Fault). Entering a Slow Order Curve Area at
106 MPH where the speed limit was flagged for 50 MPH is deffinately the Engineers Fault.
Not paying attention, texting or talking in a cell phone tells this Engineer as operating
in Na-Na Land.
The new Aces64 engines have had teething pains with wrong signals from stray voltages. Remember the engines can and are controlled in those areas where PTC is implimented. It is all computer controlled and driven. That is both it’s strongest point “IF” everything functions like it should. It is also it’s weakest point when it is programmed by a bunch of programers all writting their little piece of the code and then all the pieces are integrated to create the final system. Just recently the FAA released a warning about the GPU power plants on the newer airplanes. It turns out that it is compter run and operated but if it does not get powered down by 267 days then a software buffer overflows and the unit goes into fail safe mode and shuts down killing all power even if you are at 35,000 feet. Years before that Airbus showed off their brand new aircraft at the Paris Airshow and tried to do a low flyover of the air show airfield. Instead the aicraft flew into the ground. It turns out the programers had never known that they do touch and goes and low pass flyovers so the plane overrode the pilot and flew into the ground. Look at the constant troble with cars suddenly speeding up and people call for help and the cars usually crash at a high spped. When they check the computers the computers say “the computer controlled gas peddle was constantly depressed by the drivers” who said their foot was off the gas and they had both on the brake pushing as hard as they could.
I have to wonder if anyone is looking at the fact that a programing glitch may have caused the train to speed up without input from the engineer.