Friday, May 15, 2015

Amtrak Crash.

It's been on the news ever since it happened Wednesday night.  My deepest sympathies for the dead and injured. 
  Looks like the engineer is the cause of the crash.  He departs DC on time, and 11 minutes after pulling out of the station, the train is up to 106 mph going into a 50 mph curve.  He applied the brakes just as the train entered the curve and left the track.  Either the engineer fell asleep (in 11 minutes?), or suffered some kind of seizure, but after opening the throttle to get the train moving, he never backed it off to a cruise position. 
   News have never mentioned the size of the train crew.  Looks like it was just one man in the locomotive. Airliners always have two qualified pilots in the cockpit.  Railroads had a two man crew for a long time.
   Lot of talk about a magic automatic braking system that would have prevented the crash.  I'd never heard of that one before, and I am a train fan, read the magazines, build model trains.  I'm thinking a two man engine crew would have prevented the crash as well.

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