I agree she may not have realize how much she understood. But what she did understand shaped her books. Was this passage vengeance? I do not think so. It may have taken me years to grasp what she was actually telling us. I have always taken it as the death of the ideology, until recently.
It bothers me.
I suppose I never thought of the passage as any kind of vengeance. It was clear objectivism. The people described were killed by the physical detachment of their own ideas from reality. The train they had created could not make it through the tunnel. They would not ever accept anyone’s explanation as to why not.