The route was new and the engineers felt ill-prepared, but that didn’t stop Amtrak from opening the Point Defiance Bypass route near DuPont, Washington. In the end, Amtrak 501 would fly off an overpass and kill three passengers while injuring over 100 as it started a turn at more than twice the posted speed limit.
Amtrak engineers and conductors are starting to make their side of the incident known, ...
continue reading...The speed limit for the section of track was set to a relatively low 30 miles per hour. But when Cascades 501 barreled through a curve in a new section of bypass track, it was more than doubling that limit until it derailed at nearly 80 miles per hour. As a result of that derailment, three people died, dozens were injured, and the safety and ...
According to Philly.com, Amtrak never installed an automatic braking system on the northbound track where eight people died and over 200 were injured when Amtrak Train 188 derailed in Philadelphia last week. Meanwhile, less than one hundred yards away, the southbound track was already outfitted with an automatic braking mechanism that would probably have prevented the catastrophe at the sharp Frankford Junction curve.
Without an automatic braking system ...
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