[Myrddin]

A hotbox detector should have picked up on the bad bearing. They are designed to do that. In the real world things break, and it's not always foreseeable. The world is complicated. No one is to blame.

Hot box detectors are typically placed on 20 mile intervals. A bearing can burn off in 5 miles and derail a car. That was the point of the monitoring system I was building for FRA. The locomotive operator would get notification as soon as the bearing passed a settable threshold and well before a burn-off. If reports are correct, there were two hot box detectors that failed ahead of the Ohio derail.

[Governor Dinwiddie]

#33: "If reports are correct, there were two hot box detectors that failed ahead of the Ohio derail."

Thanks for fleshing out all that. I suspected something along these lines. It looks like the money saved by not properly maintaining the detectors is going to haunt NS for a long time. Penny wise, pound foolish.