20 years ago today
- Thread starter tahoejeff
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Oh, I remember it very well.. And it left a bitter taste in the public mind for train travel, many not making or understanding the distinction between Conrail and Amtrak.
had8ley
Engineer
A sobering thought to say the least. "Mr." Gates later siad, under oath, that at least half of all engineers smoked dope on the job. I think we all know better.
Superliner Diner
Conductor
G
~guest~
Guest
This looks to be one of those landmark days, that changes significantly how things operate.
One quick technical question... the article says three light engines strayed onto the track the passenger train was on. Were these spring switches... or how could those light engines get in the way... because wouldn't the switches not have been aligned properly??
One quick technical question... the article says three light engines strayed onto the track the passenger train was on. Were these spring switches... or how could those light engines get in the way... because wouldn't the switches not have been aligned properly??
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I've removed the link that was originally posted in the guests post, since it was the very same link provided by Superliner Diner in the post directly above.
I also merged the guest topic with the topic that we already had running on this very subject, but left the rest of the post intact since the guest did ask a question about this accident.
George Harris
Engineer
It was not a spring switch. It was a power operated switch. The switch was set for the straight line move of the passenger train on the main. The freight engines came from the trailing direction, in other words, from teh frog end of the turnout. For this situation a train will usually simply force its way through the points even though they are set against his move, forcing them open sufficiently to go through and carying on past the switch staying on the rails. Even though the points were damaged, the passenger train also simply ran through the damaged points from the trailing direction, staying on the rails until the point of the collision.
Even though it was an understandable automatic reaction for the engineer to stop after it finally sunk through his marijuana induced haze that he was in the wrong place, in this case it was absolutely the worst thing he could have done. Given that the passenger train was coming up behind him, he should have yanked the throttle wide opne to reduce the collision speed as much as possible. Of course how could you expect someone to do something smart after doing something so incredibly stupid?
By the way, "light" does not mean light in weight. It simply means without train attached. It was said that the first electric locomotive was so totally destroyed that the first people on the scene did not realize that the passenger train had two engines until they figured out that there were too many engine trucks scattered around. The real miracle was that there were so few deaths.
go to http://dotlibrary1.specialcollection.net/s...e=dot_railroads then click on 1987 and the first one under it is REAR-END COLLISION OF AMTRAK PASSENGER TRAIN 94, THE COLONIAL AND CONSOLIDATED RAIL CORPORATION . Click on that and you will have the NTSB Accident report, which is the official analysis of what happened. I would trust this a lot more than wikipedia.
George
Rafi
Conductor
WJZ, the local Baltimore CBS affiliate has a pretty lengthy video report with archival footage of the wreck here:
http://wjz.com/topstories/local_story_004102838.html
Rafi
http://wjz.com/topstories/local_story_004102838.html
Rafi
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