They’re saying it was only going 18MPH. First reported at 80. Never know what to believe.
I watched an eyewitness say he had never seen a train go that fast through that section of track before. Sounds like it was going too fast for those curves for whatever reason.
CGato
Yes it was going 81mph which is 2mph over the allowed speed of 79mph on the STRAIGHT sections of track. By “high speed” rail standards this is a relatively sharp corner and the pictures show that the lead locomotive kept going in almost a straight line went down a hill, stopped and the rest of the cars accordioned behind it going in all directions. This was a government run train with government employees running on government owned tracks.
On the train run that goes from Seattle to Eugene the state of Washington and the State of Oregon contract with Amtrak. The two states each subsidize 1 dollar for every dollar that Amtrak collects in fares. Even with this 2 to 1 subsidy this run still loses over $250 million dollars every year not even including capital expenditures.
Sound Transit, the government agency that owns these tracks has spent over $800 million dollars on them in the last 10 years with absolutely nothing at all to show for it... there has been no benefit to anyone other than the paychecks collected by government employees and government contractors.
This train was less than half full even on the “inaugural” run on this new route. Sound Transit has spent already spent many, many billions of dollars on local rail projects with no end in sight. This is just one more glaring example of extreme government waste.
To save a handful of people four minutes on a mostly recreational train ride from Seattle to Portland... the State of Washington has spent nearly a billion dollars on track improvements so that they could use this “bypass” through a heavily populated area. They have also killed probably close to a dozen people because on the “inaugural” run the engineer ran the train off the tracks and has paralyzed transportation in and out of the state on the I-5, by far the most used route.
The engineer was probably under pressure to demonstrate that the billion dollars just spent would actually save the 4 minutes. People were noting that the run was not reaching its destination as quickly as was originally expected. It is just a billion dollars completely and totally wasted.
I’ve been out and heard in the radio something was placed on the tracks.