Posted on 05/14/2015 5:52:23 AM PDT by RoosterRedux
The engineer in control of the Amtrak train that derailed on Tuesday, killing at least seven people, has no recollection of the moment the train crashed, his attorney has said.
Brandon Bostian, of Queens, New York, has been as the driver of the commuter service that came off the tracks near Philadelphia, leaving 200 people hospitalized.
On Wednesday, National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) investigators confirmed that the train had been traveling at 106 mph before it derailed at a curve on the tracks, where the speed limit is 50 mph.
Bostian, who has been an engineer with Amtrak since 2009, was interviewed by the police over six hours, had a blood sample taken and has handed his cell phone over to authorities.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
If his phone was off, then what the hell WAS he doing? He was only ten minutes out of the station, going well over the speed limit for the straight part of the track, and not even aware that the curve was coming up.
I get frustrated with the posts pointing out he used to be a cashier, as if that indicated some problem. I don’t understand that attitude in the slightest.
The ability to advance and move up is one of the reasons this nation is great. To see people mock and point it out as if a problem is sickening to me.
I need to take a FR break.
Idiots would like us to believe that he was immediately moved from a cash register to operating a locomotive with no training or experience. That’s why they’re idiots.
I hadn’t thought about that, but you’re right about the results of braking at high speed. Besides, it dropped the speed by only four miles an hour, to 102.
What was this engineer doing???????? He’s a crafty ole boy to say he “can’t remember”. Hillary would love this guy. “My head is JELL-O”. (*Rush Limbaugh program lyrics.)
Oh, not really, not after a few decades of being the field/construction engineer in addition to the office time.
I also see to many field "adjustments" that the hands didn't deem necessary to notify engineering about the change.
Moving the duct bank over 30 foot doesn't sound like a big deal, and wouldn't have been. But since it was a rush job, and a hard money, I bought the wire pre-cut on individual reels some they could just set up and pull, not handle it twice.
50 foot of spare cable would have been plenty for a 450' run, if they didn't add 60 feet to the run without telling me...
Lack of lube, dragging cable first in the dirt, not bracing the rollers in the tray, not blowing out the conduit, not bracing the conduit before pouring the concrete, after some time, you get to see a lot of ways how to not build things...
"The National Railroad Passenger Corporation, doing business as Amtrak, is a publicly funded railroad service operated and managed as a for-profit corporation which began operations on May 1, 1971, to provide intercity passenger train service in the United States."
We (the taxpayers) have owned this fiasco since Nixon. The gov't has been trying to get rid of it since then, but there have been no buyers so stupid once they read the balance sheet. Normally when a corporation is in the red, it has the choices of raising prices or cutting expenses. There are plenty of places to cut expenses. AMTRAK could actually make money if it just ran trains in the Northeast Corridor.
Unfortunately, it's mandated to run nearly empty trains between places nobody wants to go, so what it must do to survive is steal money from taxpayers and from taxpaying corporations that actually have a workable business plan.
But it's not a US government agency. It's an allegedly for profit corporation that can't possibly make a profit and is owned by you and me, the taxpayers. Really, it's the worst of all worlds. It's the worst of capitalism married to the worst of socialism.
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Thank you! I had to wade through 39 other posts before your clear statement of the real problem.
The sole operating responsibility of a railway "engineer" is to keep the train's speed adjusted for safe operation in present and upcoming conditions.
The sole reason that trains are not under fully automated control is ...Union "job security protection"
That would have frustrated me to no end. That would likely even cause the army to come back out of me geez.
I’m often doing the same thing, I plan a run and I don’t leave a lot of wastage, so changing a tray run or a conduit run would be a waste of material, mostly cable or wire.
In my opinion the engineer was attempting suicide and decided to take others to hell with him. However, it unfortunately did not kill him.
It’s as if he drifted off or was asleep. As somebody said upstream, hard to remember what happened while you were asleep.
You can also get information overload. I entered a small town and I always watch for speed traps. Have GPS (as a side note), radar detector, had my two phones but they were laid down. Knew I entered the town and for some reason saw a car creeping up on me and almost without thinking probably increased my speed by 5mph. Boom. 42 miles an hour in a 30. I was just seeing the second sign but guess I missed the first (I think it was placed just past a bridge for a speed trap trick). Probably 3-5 seconds of inattention to the *side* of the road and boom, the little Kansas town scored some more cash.
And I always, always, always try to stay within about 5mph of the posted speed limit if for no other reason than to avoid the fee trap.
I would think that the bright lights big city would be an indication that 106 mph was way outta line. I lean towards asleep or intentional. I doubt he had the same 3-5 seconds of inattention I had. Since he handed over the cell phone, he doesn’t seem too concerned.
Well, we’ll see if they find anything out.
I’m slowly coming around to that theory at the moment.
Thanks for your comments on the Positive Train Control implementation. It is interesting that it was mandated by law in 2008 though some proprietary systems appear to have been initiated earlier - supposedly to be complete by the end of this year.
You probably already know all this, I just found an interesting white paper:
http://transitwireless.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/PTC_whitepaper_may2012_ver2.pdf
And an article after the latest accident:
http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/05/14/406652406/positive-train-control-the-tech-that-couldve-prevented-amtrak-derailment
What is amazing to me is that the system being implemented by Amtrak is so complicated (equipment installations...). I appreciate your comment about the accuracy that can be available from standard GPS systems (generally about 10 ft horizontal), but much better accuracy has been commercially available at a higher cost - and a couple of years ago accuracy within inches was developed using open source software that should be more reasonable (see http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2013-08/global-positioning-down-inches ). Seems the systems being implemented continue to use technology from years ago.
Yes - per your and other comments, incompetence and turf protection by unions seem to be the root of the problem.
....or idle speculation, either, IMHO.
The GPS the RRs use is only accurate to 30 ft. This means the employee must tell the system which track he is on. Also not implemented in yards or on sidings.
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