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Expert: 3D scans of the Amtrak 188 crash will help investigators
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Horrifying damage. Completely unnecessary loss of life and limb. The engineer needs to face criminal charges.
We may never know what really happened, but the fact that there was an obvious hit of some kind on the Windshield, tells me that the engineer probably ducked quickly. If any of you do this forcibly, you may become disoriented briefly. There is the distinct possibiity that he may have whacked his head on the dashboard in front of him as well. I hope criminal charges are never filed against this man. He was, one of us, a railfan that was living the dream and now has many decades of nightmares ahead.
If you duck your head quickly and hold it low for several seconds, you can also get almost instant vertigo. My wife was combing her hair a year ago, doing the way she had done for all 63 years of her life. And when she
raised up, she was unstable, nauseated, and dizzy. The ER doctor, also a lady, diagnosed it as, in simple
terms, “you lost your rocks”. What she referred to was small bits of calcium on the hairs or feeler in the cochlea which act as our internal gyro. Some fell off, and thus the undamped feeler was sending erroneous data to the brain. It took several days to clear up.
J. H. Sullivan
(retired from SR and CSX, and card carrying railfan since birth - Uncle was a L&N Engineer)
To Jerry: I too had a vertigo event caused by a mild shock to my inner ear. Just as you described, I went in an instant from a perfectly healthy 40 year old to a room-spinning dizziness that lasted for nearly a week. My docs described the syndrome just as you did: a loss of a few of the little weights that align the hairs in the inner ear like pendulums that send balance signals to the brain. When these little hairs are in disarray, they send orientation signals that don’t match what your eyes are seeing, which causes violent vertigo. The only temporary relief is to close your eyes for a moment. When it happened to me, I had to wait for a while before I had enough control to slowly drive home. And no way could I have handled a performant train-set through a convoluted route at night. It’s just conjecture if this happend to the 188’s engineer, but if it did, then it fits the scenario perfectly. He would be sitting there with his head literally spinning, trying to keep from vomiting or falling down, and unable to do the simplest control actions for a few critical minutes.