Amtrak Train Derails In Washington

On 18 December 2017, an Amtrak train in Washington crashed.

Around three people have died and “Police say 19 people were taken from the scene uninjured. Of the approximately 100 people transferred to hospital for evaluation, 10 were considered to have serious injuries,”the BBC said.

According to the BBC, the train was going around 80 mph while the track could only handle a train going 30 mph.

“The derailment happened on a section of track previously only used for freight trains,” the BBC said.

This means that this was kind of dangerous to begin with.

“A safety system called Positive Train Control (PTC) was not operational on the train in question,” the president of Amtrak told reporters.  “Using GPS tracking, PTC automatically warns the driver of speed limits and other local conditions and applies the train’s brakes if the warnings are not heeded. Congress originally legislated for PTC to be installed by the end of 2015, but it is still not even halfway complete.”

This is also extremely dangerous because the train was unable to be notified about the speed limit of the track.

“The NTSB has said that PTC technology could have prevented numerous railroad accidents that involved human error,” CNN said.

So PTC could have potentially helped the train, had it been installed.

This is not the first time an Amtrak train has crashed. In 2015, an Amtrak train in Philadelphia derailed after it hit a curve at 106-mph in a 80-mph zone.

There was also a supposed terrorist attack, where brakes were randomly pulled on an Amtrak train, in Nebraska on 6 January 2017.  Amtrak staff searched the train and discovered the perpetrator in the engineer’s seat of the follow engine, where he was behaving erratically and playing with the controls. A Furnas County deputy sent to the scene found Amtrak employees holding the man, court documents said.

“He had a loaded revolver, plus more ammunition and a knife,” the deputy said.