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 ...
“Where is the engineer’s cell phone?”
Where is the engineer? Hopefully, he’s among the survivors. That’s the next bit of news we need to see.
I think I read earlier that there was a locomotive at each end of the train. It’s possible that the one you saw on the tracks was the one at the rear of the train.
You’re on to something.
The cars don’t rattle off both sides unless there was an obstacle but the speed appears excessive as well
This arshole a Airbase Mildenhall.. today, a Jihadi was busted last year for casing the base.
Dipstick had a pass
Also very similar to a wreck about two years ago one Amtrak Northeast Corridor when a northboud took the “Conshohocken curve” in Philadelphia at more than double the posted speed limit.
Positive Train Control had NOT been installed on that section!
Something could have been on the track but that doesn’t account for not showing down. I got a feeling it was being pushed and the engineer didn’t get slowed down in time. You’d think software would iver ride a human error. Or it could have over ridden human period.
With the FBI /CIA
That's exactly what happened in the New Jersey Transit derailment last year. If you looked at where the cars ended up you'd assume the train was doing 90 mph, but it was only going about 25-30 miles per hour in a 10-mph zone. The force of the locomotive pushing the cars from the rear was what caused most of the damage.
I travel that corridor daily and my exit to home is the Mounts Road exit, right there off and on for the last 25 years.
Click on this map:
https://www.mytpu.org/tacomarail/general-information/tacoma-rail-system.htm
The rails from Lakewood to Dupont to Nisqually was owned by Burlington Northern for occasional use mainly by Ft. Lewis. Some years ago it was bought up by Tacoma Rail.
Big improvements all along the line. Ft. Lewis needed a better link to the docks at Port of Tacoma.
Mainly Amtrak wanted it because, looking at the map, the green-yellow striped rails to the west have a very slow bottleneck and frequent landslides running along the water by Pt. Defiance.
So this upgraded line offered a short cut and straight stretches of tracks, except for these curves.
Normal train traffic is 20-30 mph at the trestle. Many times I’ve seen heavy loads, like armor coming in, going 10-20 mph, and tilting through the curve.
Supposedly Amtrak did a full speed run last week. But cars loaded with people and baggage are much heavier.
Any competent transportation Engineer could easily compute the safest speed for that curve, with any loaded train.
The testing is quite simple, take a heavy train and make a number of passes at increasing speed and record the increased tilting.
It will likely be shown to be human error.
Autonomous cars? They can’t even get autonomous trains yet, and their paths are fixed by rails.
Thanks for the note.
If he had a pass, just catching him wasn’t the end of the story.
Someone had to have helped him, it seems. If he just stole the pass, it should have been deactivated.
Good question. I'll admit I haven't been glued to this story, but yeah, I haven't heard anything about him/her.
“That info should be recorded/kept somewhere one would think.”
—
It would seem natural to me for an engineer to be able to access something like it - or at least have a map of the track displayed so he knows what’s coming up.
Though if they weren’t on the ball (i.e. engineer error) then none of that would help.
The engineer has a booklet of each block and its associated speed limit. At each block signal, there is a visible speed limit sign.
I see what you mean. Though there you would still have the possibility of “error by computer”.
http://gpsworld.com/no-positive-train-control-on-train-that-derailed-over-i-5
“PTC makes it possible to monitor the location of the train and the speed at which it travels, by using GPS and sensors placed both in the trains and along the tracks.
A computer system centralises the data and prevents any excess speed, any red light or collision with another convoy by acting on the locomotive instead of the driver, to curb if it goes too fast, or stop it completely if an obstacle has been detected on the tracks for example.”
Airliners have fly by wire, and high speed trains have sleeping engineers at the throttle. Bizarre!
Or having homosexual sex with the co engineer with more to follow after they reached Seattle.
The rear engine and was still on the track. The front engine went off the track, down the embankment and onto the freeway. It stopped fairly short even with all the cars behind it still pushing. I don’t believe it was going 81 miles an hour or it would have crossed the road. You’d think. NBC had a computer generated “video” of how it probably happened based on the locations of the cars once they were stopped.
A new theory. https://pjmedia.com/trending/anarchists-bragged-april-sabotaging-railroad-tracks-block-fracking/?print=true&singlepage=true
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