A Seattle news channel report this afternoon said it was the first time the train had been run on the route!! No proving runs prior to loading and running with passengers??!!!!!!!!!!!! No familiarization/practice runs for the engineer? Amtrak in my opinion appears tobe running on a thin thread, It seems to me, that too many of the train accidents have this element of engineer carelessness &/or unfamiliarity. It would apear to me Amtrak needs to spend more on getting engineers aboard who aren't over-tired and are more familiar with the route and the equipment.
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So far I haven't seen any changes in the crash 'physics' but here's a fresh new batch of crashes in Train.
![Crash Crash](/uploads/1/2/6/6/126653692/912234392.jpg)
Originally posted by:I speculate that since it was a brand new length of track, never used before this train, that a piece of construction material was left on the track or fell onto the track as the construction crew left.An inspection should have been done just prior to the passenger trains arrival.A sad event for sure.:(they did inspect everything, they also performed a year and half worth of testing, the media is always 90% wrong on this kind of stuff. The train was clocked at 81.1 mph 1 mile before the curve, they do not yet know the speed when it entered the curve as that is recorded in the trains black box, the 81.1 mph was recorded by a track sensor. The speed limit before the curve is 79mph, the speed limit at the curve is 30mph, there were also test engineers aborad monitoring, makes me wonder if someone ordered the train to keep going fast as the new run is called high speed from seattle to portland.
As with all terrible events, confusion abounds. For me, this is a local disaster; I live in Seattle and have driven that route hundreds of times. Here's what I've been able to learn. The train was on its first scheduled run, but the route had been tested well before this.
The train was running at 81 mph (2 mph over the limit, a bad sign) just before the speed change to 30 for the cross-over at Interstate 5, and it shows all the hall-marks of engineer inattention and failure to reduce speed in time for the curve. Other engineers had raised this concern, especually as PTC implementation has been repeatedly delayed by Congress. It's unclear where the conductor was; on freight runs he's usially in the cab,but on passenger runs that's not always the case.
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