Word: amtraks
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...Amtrak's Miami-New York Silver Star was barreling through a predawn rainstorm at 77 m.p.h. when the last six cars suddenly jumped the tracks and slammed into two freight cars parked on a siding. While none of the passenger cars turned over, 25 ft. of the Silver Star's stainless-steel skin was peeled back, ripping out seats and killing five men and two women. "Glass and metal were flying in," said Dave Elmers, a passenger from West Palm Beach, Fla. "It just opened up that train like a sardine can." Said Steven Clark, a passenger from Philadelphia...
...derailment, near Camden, S.C., injured at least 78 passengers. It was the worst Amtrak accident since 1987, when 16 were killed in a wreck in Chase, Md., and is the nation's eighth train wreck in two months. The cause of the disaster is still unknown, but officials from the National Transportation Safety Board suspect a faulty switch on the track. Declared New York passenger Ann Jo Rob: "This was my first time on a train. And this is my last time...
...trainee engineer making his first passenger run was at the controls of the Amtrak Night Owl as it approached Boston's Back Bay Station at the morning rush hour. Tripping signals about a mile from a curve, the train, carrying roughly 200 people, was moving at 91.8 m.p.h. When the overnighter from Washington reached the curve, it should have slowed down to 30 m.p.h. The trainee, Richard Abramson, 41, told investigators that he hit the brakes three times before the curve, but they failed to slow the 120-ton locomotive. Willis Copeland, a veteran engineer supervising Abramson, tried the emergency...
...America back on the trains. Railroads are by far the most fuel-efficient form of passenger transportation, achieving nearly 10 times the number of passenger-miles per gallon as cars. Yet the U.S. is stuck with the pathetically inadequate and ineffecient Amtrak system, the rolling laughingstock of the industrial world. Despite large subsidies, Amtrak remains hamstrung by union featherbedding, bureaucratic stupidity, and the inability to compete with other modes of transport...
Almost unbelievably, the most-traveled route on the Amtrak system--the Boston-Washington line--is still not fully electrified; all trains must switch locomotives in New Haven, Conn. The U.S. needs a renewed political and financial commitment to making train travel rapid and economical. Developing a new generation of high-speed trains will be awfully expensive (especially building rail lines through the suburban sprawl of the Northeast Corridor), but the energy shortage will require it sooner or later. And the longer we wait, the worse the obstacles become...