Right place, right time. But I’m personally betting it was caused by a conductor who just made it to the next level of Candy Crush on his/her iphone.
Can a NY commuter help me out here?
Those trains slow down so much over the last couple miles coming into that station because of curves and switches. If this train was going fast enough to do this kind of damage it would have derailed earlier or have had to accelerate at the last minute.
I really don’t think it was negligence or an accident. I do believe it would have been intentional.
(I could be wrong, I have been before, plenty of times.)
If the system is designed such that one person, the conductor, can kill many people because of an error, it's not an acceptable system. People pass out, die, etc.. It happens. If they can design cars that automatically brake when the driver screws up, why can they make trains automatically slow down when approaching a station or the end of the track?