Amtrak train breaks apart at 125 mph [MD]

nypost.com ^ | 02/06/2018 | By Danielle Furfaro

[mairdie]

There used to be more. I still can remember taking dogs and cats on trains.

[yldstrk]

4 accidents in a couple weeks?

[Alas Babylon!]

I was going to post “In before the Deep State gets blamed!”, but I guess I’m way too late!

[mairdie]

A surprisingly high percentage of AMTRAK trains hit things. I’ve been stuck for hours many times in the middle of nowhere. When it’s very bad, I’ve seen our car attendant hide. I believe the rule is that they stay until they find the head. I’ve never understood people who would lay the moral pain of their suicide on another human being, as they do with train engineers.

[dfwgator]

This is no way to run a railroad.

[DuncanWaring]

They had hundreds of paying passengers.

But only 53 were on-board.

[mairdie]

The Post Office used to do pretty well in their little airplanes.



"May the Good Lord take a liking to him." This was the devout prayer of a grizzled old cowman, as he stood spellbound for a full twenty minutes, and watched an airman and his craft standing still in the heavens. He was witnessing the heroic battle against a 100-mile hurricane by Pilot Burr Winslow in his famous speed-distance ship 158 (the ship that holds all records for distance flown and all records for speed, except one for the Transcontinental Red Line air road), thousands of feet above Reno in the murky spume of mists in the gathering of the full forces of the terrific storm that shortly followed.

Above, far, far above the earth, the monstrous silvered petrel of the clouds stood stationary, and the glints of the lustrous body could be seen, hanging and shivering, like a living, lost and frightened creature from another world.

As the flashing hurrying mists drove by the seeming suspended ship, a small speck of dark could be marked as the airman out in the cockpit. The struggling plane was being manipulated by this driver with sinews of steel and muscles of seasoned hickory, with the nerve and initiative acquired in his signal achievements of past performances in dangerous situation. But never before had this sky scooter been called upon to meet a like condition of such extreme danger.

Overhead and covering the entire sky, high up and beyond the quivering man-made bird, the dense black clouds moved with the velocity of light. The thunder roar of the billowing mists, angry and white-rimmed, swirled through the sky with momentum incalculable. Along the Sierra peaks there was a wide stretch of clearness, confined to the width of the tops of the range, an unheard-of and unusual circumstance. A scene creating a Dante's Inferno. Here was an electron striving and fighting against the supremacy of the thunder and storm gods, a vision, a picture in that sky that will make lasting impression of such vividness that it will never be effasced from the memory of those who witnessed it.

Hundreds of people between Reno and Verdi, 14 miles away, watched breathlessly, and with straining eyes, and shortened breaths, the battle, expecting every second to see the tragedy that it seemed would issue and become a broken hurtling mass earthward.

[Red Badger]

Would anybody want to buy a broken down railroad?....................

[Karl Spooner]

The FBI Express.

[raiderboy]

The track is worth something. It needs repair so it would be at a discount.

[Red Badger]

Amtrak just rents the tracks..................

[Pollster1]

“Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.”
- Ian Fleming

[Professional Engineer]

Amtrak doesn’t own the tracks, just the rolling stock. They have access to the rails owned and maintained by actual railroads.

[jiggyboy]

That’s better than what I have been thinking: a Terminator from the future, except he/it has only a vague notion that Sarah Conner will be on some Amtrak train on the Eastern seaboard route sometime in the early part of 2018.

[raiderboy]

Oh — well then — it’s worthless. I sure don’t think we can afford to subsidize it anymore on either economic or safety grounds.

[raiderboy]

I see. Well it has negative value. The Tax payers should pay to get rid of it.

[PIF]

They had hundreds of paying passengers.

But only 53 were on-board.

---

then that train was running at a loss. A big loss ... was nice ride back in the 50s, but passenger trains are just an expensive novelty these days, but it does beat taking the bus ...

[outpostinmass2]

The 2150 leaves D.C. at 5 am and arrives in Boston at 12:45. I have taken this train before and it is typically half empty leaving D.C. but fairly full once it leaves Philadelphia around 6:30 am and standing room once it arrives in NYC. Trains departing NYC for Boston are usually packed.

This train broke apart somewhere in Maryland.

Amtrak has problems but light loads on the NEC is not one of them.

[jmacusa]

FOR CRYING OUT LOUD WHY IN THE NAME OF GOD IS THIS DAMNED RAILROAD STILL OPERATING!!!! Sorry for shouting but for Gods sake, what the hell is the standard for failure for this terrible excuse of a railroad?

[Red Badger]

Government programs are the closest thing to immortality mankind has yet to discover...............