So Al Queda has made it clear targeting passenger trains in the United States is a tactic they plan to use.
http://www.nbcchicago.com/traffic/transit/124511984.html
This is the second incident where a truck driver went through a gate and drove into the side of a moving Amtrak train. The driver was killed along with four employees and passengers – the truck erupted in a ball of flames that caught several of the train cars on fire. The truck was a gravel hauling truck. The Chicago to California train was hit at 1:25 PM and the weather was clear.
In addition to the the Amtrak train, this a a major freight route of the United Pacific which will be disrupted.
So what do we know about the driver other than he is dead…
From the description, this appears to be the location – it’s in the middle of nowhere on a straight road with visibility for miles – and far from any quick response from fire departments or ambulances.
We still don’t have a name, picture or citizenship status of the driver, but now local sources report the truck is owned by a local company and the driver is from the area. He was the lead truck in a three truck convoy through the desert – the other two trucks saw the gate go down and stopped.
Yeah, well Homeland security, here is your solution.
Now-a-days we have cars that can park themselves, and are equipped with rear view cameras. Trucks that have rain sensing wipers and automatically come on when the headlights are turned on.
A new homeland security directive will be implemented to combat such train crossing terrorism and protect the ‘sheeple’.
All new trucks and cars will be equipped with ‘in-cab’ signals. Older trucks will be retrofitted at owners expense. These ‘in-cab’ signal devices will pick up a transmitted signal from a railroad crossing gate when the train approaches gates go down. Brakes are automatically applied. Also the transmission is disengaged & or ‘Jake’ brake is enabled.
Cars with ‘in-cab’ signal devices & automatic transmissions will have brakes applied. If your foot does not hit the brake pedal in time, the transmission will be put in park when speed is below 15 MPH. Of course this will hurt the transmission and be costly to repair, but it is an incentive to stop.
As an additional incentive to stop at railroad crossings, steel plates will pop up from beneath the pavement to provide additional barrier.
You will stop.
This will be mandated by Barack Mouch for every railroad crossing and will be paid for by the railroad & with a fee tacked onto every drivers auto-insurance premium. Of course for those that are low income and get the earned income tax credit, you will get your fee refunded plus $20 for the inconvenience, from the IRS. This is so there will be no undue hardship and you will get to keep your free cell phone that is also provided by the Government.
This can’t miss.
maybe I should put apply for a patent ?
There is a more obvious solution – one that is already widely used – spend lots of free government money to build bridges or underpasses to eliminate grade crossings.
The problem with that is the legal rule on such things is “who was there first?”. Most railroads predate paved roads, so the expense falls on the States, not the railroad.
This country is full of viaducts and bridges that have been built at great expense over long abandoned railroad rights of way.
A freight train has derailed near St Louis.
http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/crime-and-courts/article_384fba38-9fae-11e0-8e33-001a4bcf6878.html
A coherent explanation is forming
I spent a year or so of my first “retirement” hanging out in Porter Indiana watching trains go by. Amtrak trains have a safety issue when they share tracks with freight trains (which is most of the time. In a rural area with hood tracks, an Amtrak train will usually be going 79 MPH, the highest speed they can go without special train collision prevention systems.
Freight trains usually go much slower – “hot” trains like UPS freight and coast to coast container trains may go 70 MPH, but your typical unit trains (usually coal) or mixed freight go much slower.
If the crossing signals activate based on the speed of the Amtrak train, it could be 3 or 4 minutes before a freight train arrives at a crossing, which causes people to think the signal is malfunctioning, and they go around the gate. If you set the distance based on the freight train, there won’t be time for vehicles to stop.
This road has a 70 MPH speed limit. Gates have a two step process – first the lights and warning bells come on, but the gates stay up – similar to a yellow traffic light – you have to give people time to react and stop and not trap them on the tracks (these gates only block one lane). Once that phase is over, then the gates go down, and the train goes by.
This train was 4 hours behind schedule which means lots of problems. The time between activation of a crossing signal and arrival of the train is supposed to be a minimum of a minute, not 25 seconds.
How do the crossing signals know if the oncoming train is a 79 MPH Amtrsk train or a 25 MPH Coal train? It’s magic, and the magic failed to work. I strongly suspect this will be mostly a signal malfunction, combined with a truck driver thinking he could beat the train.
A few more details – the train was going 78 MPH – the 79 MPH limit is controlled by a governor – the train had no bypass or manual override – so it’s not possible for the train to have been going faster.
The engineer saw the approaching truck and anticipated the crash and had thrown the train into emergency stop – that probably prevented the train from derailing and reduced the carnage considerably.
Still no ID on the truck driver or his country of origin