Amtrak Train Derails

[Chicat]

5 dead so far. No cause known just yet.

[CalStateTempe]

Awful.

Rode that exact line from DC to NYC 4 times last month.

[Chicat]

Yeah, rode it quite a bit as a kid and I know a few people from high school who ride it now occasionally for work. Scary shit for sure.

[Chicat]

In '43 a train derailed at the same place (Frankford Junction) and killed 79 people.

http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-fr ... 8388659EDE

Apparently trains have to slow down significantly there.

[Merkin]

[SCCats]

107 in a 50 mph curve.

[Longhorned]

Crap. That could mean the brakes weren't operating.

[ghostwhitehorse]

http://www.nbcphiladelphia.com/news/loc ... 20821.html

Minutes before Amtrak Regional 188’s violent derailment in darkness Tuesday, two other trains were hit by projectiles along the same line.
Amtrak Acela 2173 — heading to Washington, D.C. from New York — had a passenger window damaged around 9:15 p.m. as it traversed the southbound line toward Philadelphia’s 30th Street Station.

?!?

[Longhorned]

http://www.nbcphiladelphia.com/news/loc ... 20821.html

Minutes before Amtrak Regional 188’s violent derailment in darkness Tuesday, two other trains were hit by projectiles along the same line.
Amtrak Acela 2173 — heading to Washington, D.C. from New York — had a passenger window damaged around 9:15 p.m. as it traversed the southbound line toward Philadelphia’s 30th Street Station.

?!?

I don't know. It's weird. I ride that route and on Septa frequently. I've never heard of windows getting smashed by projectiles. But how do you get from throwing rocks to a train going double the speed around a curve? I can get why more isn't being made of this.

[ghostwhitehorse]

http://www.nbcphiladelphia.com/news/loc ... 20821.html

Minutes before Amtrak Regional 188’s violent derailment in darkness Tuesday, two other trains were hit by projectiles along the same line.
Amtrak Acela 2173 — heading to Washington, D.C. from New York — had a passenger window damaged around 9:15 p.m. as it traversed the southbound line toward Philadelphia’s 30th Street Station.

?!?

I don't know. It's weird. I ride that route and on Septa frequently. I've never heard of windows getting smashed by projectiles. But how do you get from throwing rocks to a train going double the speed around a curve? I can get why more isn't being made of this.

http://nypost.com/2015/05/13/horror-sto ... rak-train/

From the slide show at the bottom of the article. . .



Impact craters likely from the crash. . . but suppose one isn't and the engineer was concussed prior to the crash and he slumped on the accelerator (if that is even possible)?

[Longhorned]

Impact craters likely from the crash. . . but suppose one isn't and the engineer was concussed prior to the crash and he slumped on the accelerator (if that is even possible)?

The investigation may be turning in this direction. Not that the engineer was necessarily concussed and (somehow) accelerating, but distracted and not breaking in time to reduce speed... and then applying the emergency breaks too late... and then not remembering any of these details. In other words, there could be culprit who was attacking trains by throwing rocks at them or shooting at them.

[Chicat]

That picture is like something out of a movie.

[Merkin]

[Catintheheat]

As far as I know freight trains always have the right-of-way. That was probably a mistake by the controller, or a bug in the controller software.

[azgreg]

[ASUHATER!]

Glad I got my Amtrak experience out of the way a couple weeks ago.

[Longhorned]

We're doing a family sleeping car on the overnight Amtrak from Tucson to Los Angeles in a few weeks. Looking forward to it. Maybe we'll derail. More likely, we'll all catch covid.

[UAEebs86]

We rode the Amtrak from Maricopa, AZ to San Antonio once.

Once.

[dovecanyoncat]

Freight has dominance. You can get stuck en route and have to wait.

[Longhorned]

I love Amtrak! If I'm having dinner, sleeping, and breakfast, why would I care if there's "waiting"? Waiting = sleeping, eating, and drinking booze.

[dovecanyoncat]

Picture yourself in downtown Spokane.

[Longhorned]

That's true.

[dovecanyoncat]

I'm sorry LH, that wasn't fair of me.

[ASUHATER!]

My trip was from Tucson to Deming, NM. Fiance picked me up there and we continued on to Silver City for the weekend. Trip there was fine. The way back the train was delayed for hours and I was sitting at a gas station in Deming in the heat waiting for the train to ever show up and eventually gave up and got on a Flix bus back to Tucson and got home hours late.

[Merkin]

[azgreg]

[Merkin]

I checked into Amtrak one time to get to Tucson. It was a 24 hour trip from the Central Coast.

This may help.

[ASUHATER!]

The one time I took Amtrak it took 6 hours to get from Tucson to El Paso, which is like 2 hours longer than driving almost

[azgreg]

Travel by train is fantastic, except in the state of Ohio.

[Merkin]

My daughter in Japan takes the trains everywhere, even goes on them to 7-11 to get some popcorn. Although they are a 2 car family.

Reminded of my first 6 months in San Francisco when I didn't have a car. Took the light rail to go to Safeway or do my laundry.

Not having a car was fantastic. We took public transportation everywhere.

[RichardCranium]

I've taken the train from Tucson to LA a couple of times. It did go through "Phoenix" on the way IIRC. But "Phoenix" was some suburb a million miles from anywhere you could get transportation away from to actually get anywhere you might actually want to go.

[UAEebs86]

I've taken the train from Tucson to LA a couple of times. It did go through "Phoenix" on the way IIRC. But "Phoenix" was some suburb a million miles from anywhere you could get transportation away from to actually get anywhere you might actually want to go.

The closest it gets to Phoenix now is the town of Maricopa. We lived in Chandler and drove down there once to catch the train to San Antonio.