Nevermind… not going to speculate on anything at this point. Too many lives have been lost to do so.
Speeding? What do we know about how fast it was going? On that stretch of the route, ‘normal’ speed could be over 70-80 mph.
More than 100 mph before the crash.
Which may be possible on that section of the route. The next stop would be Trenton, so it was probably still picking up speed for that run into Trenton.
The NE Corridor between NYC and DC is Amtrak’s fastest and most robust route. They actually own the tracks as opposed to the freight rail companies on other routes. The situation with the Acelas is that there are only very few stretches of tracks on the route where it can go its fastest speed. Not so with the NE Regional trains (of which this train was) running on older rolling stock, which runs at a lower speed (still can go over 100 mph on most of the run between NYC and DC).
I think both can be true.
The national transportation infrastructure * is a mess*, but also compounded by pilot error.
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/falling-apart-america-neglected-infrastructure/
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/09/15/bridges-need-repair/2816881/
I love taking the train, even though it isn’t always faster than driving.
Very sad.
Family member had ticket for this route tomorrow.
Any projections on when they will have trains run from NYC to Phila again?
Looking for alternatives.
Amtrak is very convenient usually. And comfortable for resting or using WIFI for work.
This route is very heavily covered by intercity buses. Try Megabus, Bolt, plus Greyhound, etc.
Buses are pretty good. Recommend Bolt over Megabus or Greyhound. Wifi available. So much cheaper than Amtrak, too. My guess is they are probably filling up, though.
I prefer Megabus, since they run the doubledeckers with free wifi and charging stations on all seats.
Train geeks on another forum say that there is video of the train going past, and calculating how fast x cars pass the image, they calculate that the train was going about 100MPH. There is a curve in that area (it is a yard area in NE philly) that is pretty sharp, and speed according to these guys is supposed to be around 50mph. We won’t know in any certainty until the NTSB investigates and looks at the speed in the recorder on board.
There is some irony to this, a train accident happened at this location back in the 1940’s, a hotbox (journal on a wheel ran out of lubrication), the axle broke and something like 117 passengers were killed.
The speed limit in this section of track is 50 mph. I don’t know if that applies throughout the city (from 30th Street Station to the edge of the city) or just at the Frankford Junction, which is almost a 90 degree turn. There are reports the train was going over 100 mph. Very sad.
Was not familiar with Bolt, and this is the first article that came up on google…
In case you thought the reports of high speed were “speculation”:
http://www.cnn.com/2015/05/13/us/philadelphia-amtrak-train-derailment/
So like, are train engineers (or enough of them, anyway) that dumb to not understand the laws of physics?
Why are you speculating with such judgment? How do you know that, IF, this is engineer error, that there wasn’t some medical emergency on his/her part that caused this wreck? You don’t.
I’ve been on that train many, many times, although in recent years I’ve been taking the Megabus or Bolt bus because they are so much cheaper. Where it crashed is still in a very crowded part of the city. There’s no way the train should have been going anywhere near 100 mph.
BTW… as busdriver has so carefully informed members of this community many times over the years that speculating what happened before the preliminary investigations are done in airplane crashes is dangerous, I think the same could be said for this investigation. Let the professionals do their work.
They have a black box with video from the front of the train and they have wreckage indicating the crash must have been at a high speed, and they have surveillance video.
As for an excuse for being at a high speed around a dangerous and well-known curve in that area, sure, why not. The guy who killed 150 people in the French Alps clearly experienced a medical condition.
And to say “it’s infrastructure” is just as reckless as saying “it’s high speed”.
I don’t know what happened with the train engineer, but I do know the laws of Newtonian physics. And I also know that it is high time for the NTSB or whomever to start thinking about stuff that would make your or my day at the office a bummer, like having a bad cold or a sprained ankle or going through a rough divorce, and whether if a pilot or train engineer who has the same “bad day” cause might with no malice or intent do their job just a little bit poorer because of it.
Yet people whine and cry about their precious kids getting a bad grade, like a professor has the power over life and death. We don’t. Train engineers, bus drivers, and pilots do.
Right now, no one is accusing the train engineer of anything. But if he or she is not the person in control of the speed, who was?
Philly news reports train going twice the recommended speed
NTSB- update facts- preliminary report-
departed station 910pm 238 passengers - prior to derailment engineer applied breaks.
maximum speed should have been 50 mph
train was going 106 mph 3 seconds later 102 mph…
Expected week long investigation. They don’t know why and want to prevent this from recurring .
Here is where infrastructure would make a difference.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Civil_Speed_Enforcement_System
This system has been installed all over the NE Corridor, but not at this location. It would have automatically slowed the train so that the train would be at 50 mph before the turn.
It is true that we don’t have all the information and won’t for a while. But, 106 in a 50 mph zone seems like it’s at least a big part of the root cause. It will be a while before we learn why this happened and if there were other contributing factors.