Posted on 12/18/2017 6:00:15 PM PST by Mariner
The Amtrak train that derailed Monday morning on its inaugural trip through a faster railway route was supposed to slow dramatically before entering the curve where the crash occurred.
The speed limit at the curve where the train crosses Interstate 5 is 30 miles per hour, said state transportation department spokeswoman Barbara LaBoe, while the speed limit on most of the track is 79 mph. She said speed-limit signs are posted two miles before the lowered speed zone and then just before the zone.
“Engineers are trained to slow trains according to posted speeds,” she said.
Daniel Konzelman, who was driving on I-5 south parallel to the train, said he was traveling at 60 mph or more and watched the train pass his vehicle about a half-mile before the crash. A website that monitors locations and speeds of Amtrak trains, transitdocs.com, reported that the train was going about 81 mph shortly before the derailment, The Associated Press reported.
Russell Quimby, a consultant who was previously an investigator-in-charge for the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), said it appeared to him that the derailment was caused by speed. He said the track appeared relatively undisturbed, so it seemed unlikely that something knocked the train off the track, and he noted that it appeared the train drove in a straight line, missing the turn.
(Excerpt) Read more at seattletimes.com ...
1 sign 2 miles away is not much warning either for such a huge mass to slow down. They should have flashing when above like on road constructions n
we need automated trains
Yes it’s hard to believe that on the first day with paying customers you have speed be a problem or not paying attention.
One would think they practiced this new line with an experenced engineer, who knows
If it was speed caused, the engineer has a job just as a bus driver. DO IT.
The “s” shape of trains in collision, “rattle off on both sides” is a natural product of physics. As the front of one car leaves the track the car tends to pivot and steer the following car to the opposite side and will cause it to pivot which will then steer the following and on and on.
Barring other intrusions in the process
Maybe the engineer missed the speed limit signs due to texting?
Woman driver. At least sounded like it on the radio tape calling in the accident.
“...and, it looks like they “got all ziggy-zaggy” and rear-ended each other, and fell off the rails:”
That is a huge risk from sudden braking. When Lucy pulls the cord and the train skids to a stop, flat spotting steel wheels and derailing just that way are giant risks.
Speeding earlier, then braking late too hard to get down to that speed limit can and will do it.
Did anyone here Allahu Akbar coming from the locomotive at the time of the derailment?
Engineers are supposed to be familiar with the route before they run it. I don’t know if railroads still publish division rulebooks (meant for internal use), but the rulebook would list speed restrictions in relation to mileposts. The rulebook also describes sidings, interlockings, and other operating details.
This was a Talgo trainset, which, due to tilting technology, can handle curves faster. But still, the curve reportedly has a 30 mph speed restriction per rulebook. That is significant. Even with some tilting technology, hitting a 30 mph rulebook curve at over 60 is way excessive.
High speed trains, as run in Europe and Japan (this means 200km/h+, 125mph+) typically have curve radii in excess of 1 mile.
#10 Pretty neat. I noticed that about all the trains show late. Some are a few minutes but several are 1/hr to 2/hr 41 mins late. So much for a schedule.
Customer: When will I get to town?
Conductor: Whenever
“If a train goes off the track around a curve due to excessive speed (only), the rail cars will generally be all on one side of the track, outside the curve.”
the engine and first car will go off that way, but the rest of the cars are then so abruptly slowed that they’ll start jack-knifing and going every which way ...
“Inaugural trip = Titanic AMTRAK”
That was my first comment to the guy telling me about the news this morning. And both trying for the fastest time yet. Boy - wouldn’t it be weird if the possible object on the track was an iceberg? (hmm - refrigerator - ice chest - blocks of dry ice....)
Excellent explanation, CH. I was going to offer to work out some vectors for DoughtyOne, but it’s really way too late in the day for me. (And I just got back home from a funeral.) ___ :-(
In fact, it can be seen in the pic in post 53 that several cars followed the engine off the track, but eventually the rear end of a car kicked to the left, and some following cars relatively (relatively!) unhindered thundered down the left side of the embankment.
It’s also worth noting that some of the rearmost cars may not have even been in the curve as the derailment and abrupt slowing began.
Someone mentioned that a simulation had already been done - a link would be most interesting...
I’M trying to imagine tooling down the highway and suddenly a train car or locomotive is coming at me!
Why are there still engineers driving the trains? I thought we were heading to driverless cars and trucking industries.
Why permit the guy steering a train (on tracks) to run it at whatever speed he wants when GPS and other signaling should be able to downthrottle the trains automatically.
Thank you for asking. I was wondering about that too, but could not express it this well.
Unions perhaps?
Too hard to keep people who spent their lives doing this job by demoting them to “observers” instead of operators?
Yep - back in the '70s, I was a machinist running numerical control machines. Programmers would produce tapes with instructions to the machines so once they got started they would run through the process "automatically".
One of the programmers had a last name of Craddock and we called him "Crash Craddock" because he had a propensity for running tol blocks into the pieces/chucks. When we got a new tape from him, we manually slowed things down and kept or hand on the emergency stop button for the first run through....
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