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FRA issues emergency order to control passenger train speeds along NEC
They should be KJR’s, Knee jerk reaction, only after blood is spilled do feds do anything, regardless of how many years beforehand it was known to be a problem, FAA is the same way!!!
If our dear Sarah was a person of any substance, instead of pontificating from on high safely hidden in her ivory tower she would go out and take cab rides and see the NEC curves for herself. Fat chance. She doesn’t really care whether Amtrak runs or doesn’t run anymore than the person who appointed her.
The causes for cynicism are many and run deep into our culture. NEC operating people go “haha” at the so-called regulators’ public posturing. Think how great the NEC could be and compare it with Japan’s system, which has never had a fatality from derailment or collision.
Not to my knowledge has the French TGV.
If the FRA is so darn concerned about passenger safety, how come they didn’t already know where dangerous curves and other hazards are on all passenger routes, and mandated appropriate safety procedures? I guess having four people killed at Spuyten Duyvil must have fallen within the FRA’s limits of acceptable passenger fatalities. What other conclusion is one to draw from Thursday’s Emergency Order? Please see “Blazing Saddles” if you wish to understand the real motivation behind the FRA’s actions. Harrumph!!!
Yes, neither has the TGV. Both it and the Shinkasan run many more routes and miles than the NEC and thus multiples of passengers without fatality.
It’s the curves themselves that need to be dealt with, not just improvements in slowing down trains at existing dangerous trackage. High speed trains, however defined, should start with a plan to identify and eliminate curves that require a significant reduction in speed from the general cruaing (I.e., “running”) speed on the open road between major station stops. From numerous pictures in the press, the area that caused the derailment had excessively curving track in lateral sections of track where it appeared that RR property was wide enough to allow reconfiguring the rail patterns to straighten out that line substantially.
In addition, as the incident with the other trains in that area showed, that area has a reputation for “rocking” vandalism that should be better policed by both the RR and the city, whose mayor seemed to aggressively try to eliminate as a topic of conversation in terms of a significant factor here, It’s not too far fetched to imagine that that area might have tempted a perhaps fore-warned engineer to gun his new Siemens 8000 hp engine through as much of the approach as possible, a behavior that might happen again if both factors making that area " the curves through hell" a fancified characterization among more than one engineer.
E Dean Comley
McLean VA
Remember that the French and Japanese lines mentioned here were separate lines specifically built to handle high speeds…despite improvements, the 100+ year-old NEC does not compare. Also it was not an Acela trainset that derailed (although that would also probably have derailed at that excessive speed). And the French did have a lower speed train derail—also due to excessive speed on a curve.
Folks, When you compare the NEC to any high-speed rail system, whether in Europe or the far-east, your trying to compare apples to oranges, and that is a moot conversation, period !