Free Republic

Former White House Chief of Staff and currently mayor of Chicago, Rahm Emanuel, whose city is rushing to be the next Detroit after decades of big government excesses, once said that a crisis was a terrible thing to waste since it allows you to get things done you couldn’t get done in a saner atmosphere. The Amtrak derailment outside Philadelphia is the latest case in point. Never mind that the Antrak train that crashed outside Philadelphia, killing seven, was being driven at 106 miles per hour around a curve that was designed for 50 or that the “positive train control”...

Investigators are combing through phone records, locomotive data, radio transmissions and surveillance video to determine if the engineer in last week's deadly Amtrak derailment was using his cellphone while at the controls, federal authorities said Wednesday. Brandon Bostian's phone records show calls were made, text messages were sent and data was used the day of the crash, the National Transportation Safety Board said, but it remains unclear if the phone was used while the train was in motion. Investigators won't be able make that determination until after a time-consuming analysis comparing time stamps from Bostian's subpoenaed phone records with those...

Earlier this year, Aaron Heuser of Eugene, Oregon, had to travel to Washington, D.C. The trip had two purposes: The 37-year-old mathematician was officially leaving his job at National Institutes of Health and starting a new position at a private firm. Since he is terrified of flying he booked himself a sleeper car on Amtrak. Upon reaching Reno, Nevada, there was an unexpected knock at his door. “There was a DEA badge on the window,” he said. “Having a good reason to be making this trip and being a law abiding citizen, I opened the door and politely asked if...

When a Republican lawmaker in 2011 asked an Obama administration Office of Management and Budget official to name regulations where costs were not justified by benefits, the official had a ready answer. "There is only one big one that comes to mind," said Cass Sunstein, then administrator of the White House OMB's Office of Information & Regulatory Affairs. "It is called Positive Train Control.''

The Amtrak crash outside of Philadelphia was an invitation for practically every politician in the Northeast and every transit expert in America to complain about lack of funding for the county’s infrastructure. They didn’t even wait to know what was the cause of the tragedy to take to the airwaves, and weren’t deterred when it emerged that the engineer had been going twice the speed limit around a tight curve when Amtrak Train 188 derailed. They cared only for reciting the usual litany of laments for our “crumbling” infrastructure and our lack of high-speed rail, which is supposedly a stinging...

The union for Amtrak’s locomotive engineers on Tuesday urged the railroad to put a second engineer at the controls of trains on the busy Northeast Corridor, where a derailment killed eight people and injured more than 200 others. “The public would never accept an airline operation with a single person in the cockpit,” the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen said in a statement. “There is no reason that rail employees and rail passengers’ lives should be viewed any differently.” Brandon Bostian, 32, was alone in the locomotive of Train 188 when it derailed May 12, about 10 minutes after...

WASHINGTON — For the first time, Amtrak could face a $200 million payout to train crash victims — the limit set by Congress. But that may be too low to cover the costs of the eight lives lost and more than 200 people injured in last week's derailment in Philadelphia. That payout cap for a single passenger rail incident was part of a late effort in 1997 to pass a law that would rescue Amtrak from financial ruin and help it one day become independent. ~snip~ Using past passenger rail accidents as a guide, some lawyers expect damages from the...

PHILADELPHIA (CBS) — A transit train driver says he saw a “trespasser” on the tracks moments before an unknown object struck a window on the train. The SEPTA train was struck on the same night and in close proximity to the Amtrak train that derailed on May 12th in Philadelphia. According to SEPTA officials, the engineer saw a trespasser on the track moments before an unidentified object smashed a window.

The last week has been unimaginably difficult for many Americans who lost friends or family members in the tragic derailment of Northeast Regional Amtrak train 188, which crashed on a curved track just north of downtown Philadelphia on Tuesday evening. Eight lives were lost, eight more individuals remain in critical condition and more than 200 were injured. The day after the derailment, I visited the scene to speak with Amtrak President Joe Boardman, Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) Acting Administrator Sarah Feinberg, National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) Vice Chairman Bella Dinh-Zarr and Board Member Robert Sumwalt, and Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter....

The engineer of the death train was a homosexual and a gay activist who “liked several LGBTI pages on Facebook,” a gay news site. “The engineer who was involved in Tuesday night’s Amtrak train crash is Brandon Bostian,” says gaystarnews.com. Interesting now is how the media are equivocating and blaming those old meanies, the Republicans. One site commenter to the outing of this 32 year old engineer says, “the fact is a gay activist is untouchable in the main stream media. Once his sexual preference came out, the story started changing and the blame will go towards needing more money...

Federal officials this weekend revealed the train that crashed Tuesday, killing 8, was one of two struck by objects that day. Investigators are now looking into the possibility the doomed train's windshield was struck in the moments before the crash. Amtrak, meanwhile, has been ordered to expand speed-restriction system in area of derailment in Philadelphia. NTSB investigators, however, said Sunday that no communication from the train indicated it had been hit by an object. ...snip EPTA, Southeast Pennsylvania Transportation Authority, said there's no indication the object that hit the commuter rail train is related to the Amtrak derailment. Philadelphia Mayor...

Could Bostian’s disturbed sex life have masked a deeper disturbance?

Full title: NTSB Investigator: ‘Nothing at All’ Heard From Amtrak Train Engineer Communications to Suggest Train Hit by Projectile There was no communication between the derailed Amtrak train engineer to the dispatch center to suggest that a projectile had hit the ill-fated train, National Transportation Safety Board lead investigator Robert Sumwalt said. “We interviewed the dispatchers and we listened to the dispatch tape, and we heard no communications at all from the Amtrak engineer to the dispatch center to say that something had struck his train,”

The engineer of the death train was a homosexual and a gay activist who “liked several LGBTI pages on Facebook,” a gay news site. “The engineer who was involved in Tuesday night’s Amtrak train crash is Brandon Bostian,” says gaystarnews.com. Interesting now is how the media are equivocating and blaming those old meanies, the Republicans. One site commenter to the outing of this 32 year old engineer says, “the fact is a gay activist is untouchable in the main stream media. Once his sexual preference came out, the story started changing and the blame will go towards needing more money...

Rep. Chaka Fattah (D-Pa.) estimated Saturday that Amtrak would require $117 billion for improvements to its Northeast Corridor following a fatal crash on that line earlier this week. “If we’re going to have passenger rail, we’re going to need to make it safe and make it efficient,” he told The Billy Penn. “It’s going to require investment,” he added, predicting Amtrak would need $117 “billion with a B” for reaching optimal safety and speed along its Northwest Corridor. Fattah, a senior member of the House Appropriations Committee, criticized Republicans for opposing additional funding measures for Amtrak. “One party thinks...

A passenger traveling along the same route the night that Amtrak Train 188 derailed in Philadelphia told NBC News that an object hit his train, shattering the window. The account from Johns Hopkins student Justin Landis makes him the third person to report a projectile hitting a train Tuesday night in that area, and comes a day after the National Transportation Safety Board said investigators were working to determine whether something struck the doomed Amtrak train before it derailed. Eight people were killed and about 200 others were injured in the accident.

The Federal Railroad Administration has reportedly ordered Amtrak to modify its signal system to protect against speeding around sharp curves along the Northeast Corridor, including the one where a train derailed Tuesday night killing eight people. The Wall Street Journal , citing a person familiar with the matter, reports Amtrak will change its current automatic braking system to protect against speeding trains at the curve where Northeast Regional Train 188 in Philadelphia derailed. National Transportation Safety Board member Robert Sumwalt said Thursday that such a circuit would have prevented the Amtrak derailment Tuesday.

Investigators found a “fist-sized circular area of impact” in the windshield of the derailed Amtrak train in Philadelphia.  This new twist has us all thinking the same thing:  terrorists may have again struck America’s soft underbelly. Robert L. Sumwalt, the lead investigator for the National Transportation Safety Board, said at a news conference Friday an assistant conductor reported that she heard a radio transmission between an engineer on a regional line and Brandon Bostian, the engineer on the derailed train, The New York Times reported. Investigators asked the engineer, Brandon Bostian, whether he recalled any projectiles, and he said he...

(VIDEO-AT-LINK)An Amtrak employee has filed the first lawsuit in connection to Tuesday's deadly train derailment that killed eight people and injured over 200 others in Philadelphia. The Bala Cynwyd law firm Coffey Kaye Myers & Olley, which is representing Amtrak employee Bruce Phillips and his wife Kalita Phillips of Philadelphia, confirmed with NBC10 that their clients are filing a lawsuit against Amtrak. Phillips is still hospitalized at Temple University Hospital. Phillips, an Amtrak employee, was "deadheading" in one of the rear railcars of Amtrak Regional Train 188 Tuesday night when the derailment occurred, according to the lawsuit. Deadheading is a...

MSNBC’s “Hardball” host Chris Matthews said that Republicans “treat trains like Hispanics” on Thursday. Matthews argued that AMTRAK could “unite this country. It wouldn’t be flyover country, it would be one country again. Rail could bring us together. Culturally, it would be the greatest thing. St. Louis would boom, Cincinnati, all those train stops, all those rail heads would be back in business big-time, if we were united by rail, instead of flyover, looking down on the people, the everyday people.”