“You can’t be going 106 mph and not realize it, when the actual speed limit is around half that.”
The latest on the speed is, it was going 70 mph, then when just before the curve, it sped up to 106, then he put on the emergency brake which likely helped the train to leave the track.
I saw on CNN today, the inside of such a train, with an engineer at the controls to describe how those controls worked. The reporter asked the question if the lever controlling speed could be accidently pushed into more speed. The engineer said it would be very difficult for that to happen. He had demonstrated how to use the lever to make the train go faster, but it takes moving more levelers than that one at the same time to make it go faster.
For me, that pretty much takes “accidental” out of the question as to what happened.
Breaking on the curve is the dead last thing you should do. It causes the kinetic energy to focus on going straight, which would be off the tracks.
As long as the train is moving, some of that kinetic energy is dissipated by the forward momentum around the curve. Stop the forward momentum burn off, and close to 100% is shifted to the train’s former path.
...meant to continue.
It would seem to me this guy did everything possible to take this train off the tracks.
During his training he must have been taught about breaking in curves.