burrrton wrote:Hear hear, ID.
I read the train was going ~80mph around a corner where it should have been slowed to 30mph- not that it makes any dif to the families who've lost people today, but I hope the engineer (is that still what they're called?) doesn't test positive for anything illicit if true.
burrrton wrote:Hear hear, ID.
I read the train was going ~80mph around a corner where it should have been slowed to 30mph- not that it makes any dif to the families who've lost people today, but I hope the engineer (is that still what they're called?) doesn't test positive for anything illicit if true.
RiverDog wrote:Where did you hear that? Not that I don't trust you, but I haven't heard anything about the train's speed at the time of the accident. Do you have a link?
Earlier on a news conference they said the train was going 71MPH on a stretch that was rated for 69MPH. I don't think the 2MPH is what caused this accident
Most of the route was graded for a maximum speed of 79 miles per hour; the speed limit on the corner where the crash occurred is 30 miles per hour, said Rachelle Cunningham with Sound Transit. Cunningham said she did not know how fast the train was traveling when it derailed, and the NTSB has not released information about the speed.
Of course, Japan puts far more resources into their trains than we do in the US, since in the big picture it's a much more efficient for them to move massive amounts of people over land via train rather than by air. They have a much smaller geographical area to cover, but I could the US doing something similar on both coasts and having it pay off in the long run.
RiverDog wrote:Thanks, burr. I hadn't seen that.
It was a brand new track and you would have to assume that it's undergone a bunch of testing, so we can probably rule out a problem with track installation or design. I did hear a rumor that someone saw an object on the tracks.
We do know that the speed limit on the curve was 30 mph, and just looking at the carnage, it's hard to believe that had it derailed at the 30mph speed limit for the curve that you wouldn't see the same degree of devastation even considering that there was an overpass involved. My bet is that the root cause was speeding.
Sox-n-hawks wrote:A high speed railway with a 30mph turn? That's like putting a Roundabout on the Autobahn. Makes ZERO sense. Poor engineering.
2. If there was an object on the track, was it a fallen branch (e.g. accident), was it placed there on purpose to create an accident? Was it a terror motivated motif or was it to prove a point motif?
I-5 wrote:One of the new articles I saw mentioned the possibility of the operator being distracted by another person (trainee) in the room. Very dangerous if true.
I-5 wrote:I agree, operator error is going to be an inevitable factor...we'll see how it plays out. Being distracted for even a moment in a giant piece of machinery moving at that speed can be fatal. Similarly, there is a story of an Aeroflot (flight 593) pilot who allowed his teen son into the cockpit during a flight and let him sit in the captain's seat, but no one noticed that the son had inadvertantly flipped the auto pilot into the off position and started the plane a big turn and eventually a steep dive. By the time the crew became aware, they overcompensated and put the plane into an unrecoverable stall.
RiverDog wrote:I'm all but certain that trains are equipped with GPS that issues warnings to the operator if they go into a new speed zone and haven't reduced their speed. Heck, my Garmin gives me that information as I'm driving. If the locomotive was properly equipped, there should have been warning bells and red lights flashing everywhere to reduce speed. If my assumption is correct, it must have been one helluva a distraction for the operator to have been distracted.
I'm wondering if since this was an ignaugaral run, if they hadn't finished programming the GPS information into the locomotive's navigator, making the operator unaware he was approaching a turn.
how poorly they are funded.
burrrton wrote:I don't know what we spend on maintaining existing railroad tracks, but funding is an odd thing to complain about with regard to HSR.
I guess you could complain that we don't build enough systems because the cost is prohibitive, but where we *are* building them, the amount of money we throw at them is obscene.
That thing is going to end up costing CA taxpayers 3 or 4 times that, and it's just going to go from SF to LA with no feeder lines.
burrrton wrote:It's been a while since I read anything on it, but I think most reasonable estimates put it much, much, MUCH higher than that for SF<-->LA.
The current cost overruns are merely for a stretch of it going from nowhere to nowhere, aren't they?
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