Amtrak Washington train crash: Deaths as carriages fall on US motorway

[propbeanie]

Let me interject again... I'm not familiar with what was allowed for with SoCal, but most of the Class 1 lines HAVE to have cameras inside and out. The locomotive, while not having as many events recorded as a plane (no leading or trailing edge surfaces, of course... ahem) do have quite a few.

PTC would be fine, except (besides being a regulatory boondoggle that doesn't work correctly, which is why it keeps getting delayed)... as has been mentioned by others, the local and state officials were in a hurry to get this going (gotta get those brownie points from their constituents)... the rail line has PTC (I don't know if it's fully functional in that area), but the locomotive is not equipped, from what I've seen / heard on the tellie. PTC should work on a single track rail line under most circumstances, but it does nothing without an equipped locomotive that can "read" the signals. Otherwise, the train would have had its brakes applied in an emergency fashion as soon as the train passed the point of non-compliance, which is most like 2 miles out from the curve... Who was at the controls of the locomotive? Was anyone else in the operating cab? Did they not see the violation?