Given that you can buy a GPS for <100 bucks that can tell what your speed limit is on regular roads, wouldn’t be very simple for a train to have electronics to know what the max speed should be on tracks and have electronics on the train to prevent it from going any faster? To me the concept of Google cars is many orders of magnitude more complex than making trains go the way they should.
I had been expecting an indictment because of the time passing, under the assumption that they were crossing the Ts and dotting the i’s on the data timeline and the phone evidence. Now there are reports that they can’t figure out if the engineer was on his phone, or not, at the time of the accident. I’m mystified. Its not that complicated. There’s something here beyond what’s apparent, but its not clear what.
I receive emails and text messages all the time while I’m driving – but I’m not reading or replying to them, or even looking at my phone.
Siri will set up a call for me when I’m driving, but I don’t think she will send a text message - at least, I’ve never tried.
Siri will send a text for you.
There is always the possibility that the train control system malfunctioned.
If that had been the case, I’d expect that the engineer would say that the train accelerated and he couldn’t control it. Instead we have the “I don’t remember” what happened (although he remembered that he had a Facebook page and was able to take down some of the stuff on it).
Understood. I suppose that investigators might want to suppress the details of what messages he received while driving if they couldn’t prove that he read or replied to them.
I don’t think it is unusual for people to forget the time immediately before and after a severe trauma. I watched an interview with Tracy Morgan the other day and he doesn’t remember anything about the time surrounding his accident. Of course he was in a coma. My cousin was a passenger in a terrible car crash and she wasn’t in a coma, but also remembers nothing about her accident or the time immediately surrounding it. Neither of these two would have anything to hide as they were not the operators, so I believe not remembering is possible. Not sure it is the case, but certainly plausible.
We are approaching the four-year anniversary of a horrible bike accident H was in (I shared this earlier) - concussion, six badly broken ribs, pulmonary contusion and broken clavicle that required surgery (only the worse broken clavicles require surgery). To this day, he has no recollection of what happened… not even where along the bike path it happened. He remembers leaving his last pit stop, which is about twelve miles from home, but nothing after that - it could have happened a mile from there, or a mile from home. A good Samaritan found him and brought him home, but because I didn’t know at the time H had a concussion, it didn’t occur to me to ask the good Samaritan where he found him, etc, so we’ll never know. And H is a very resilient guy. He had surgery 2.5 days after the accident, and actually went to work for a few hours a couple of days after surgery. But no memory four years later. This is a real phenomena and not just some excuse.
I agree. They are installing a"code change point" that bips to an engineer to slow down ahead of a curve for an immediate measure.
That’s been ruled out. Both the track and the engine were in proper working order.
Latest news is that he was not using his cell phone.
Actually, I believe that has not yet been determined. They are still investigating, and said it would take months.
The way I heard it is that they ruled out that he was texting or talking on his phone, but not that he was using a phone app.