I’ve received some comments, what is called “feedback” these days, on my most recent post regarding NTSB’s report on a fatal incident on Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor. Some of the commentators agree with
We, the railroads, have established certain principles of safe train operations that we wish were absolute, positive, inviolable. We apply one such principle in the enforcement of train separation: the principle that
Amtrak’s Empire Builder train 7/27 traveling westbound from Chicago to Seattle/Portland on Sept. 25 derailed near Joplin, Mont., at 3:55 p.m. MT. The passenger train was traveling between 75-78 mph, below the 79 mph speed limit, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) reported on Sept. 27 during its first media briefing.
President Joe Biden on May 19 nominated Homendy. She testified in a June 24 confirmation hearing before the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation. The full Senate on Aug. 9.
National Transportation Safety Board Chairman Robert L. Sumwalt retired from government service On June 30, 2021, following nearly 15 years at the NTSB. His tenure as the agency’s 14th chairman began in August 2017. Vice Chairman Bruce Landsberg will serve as Acting Chairman until a new chair is confirmed by the Senate. President Biden nominated NTSB Member Jennifer Homendy May 20 to become the NTSB’s 15th chair.
There are many things that can’t be hurried in this life, and probably shouldn’t be, like wine and bread (let beaujolais nouveau and matzoh be a warning to us all). There are other things that could use a bit of hurrying, like medical fitness for duty standards and the National Transportation Safety Board, but those two have proven themselves so resistant to urgings, proddings, cris du coeur, that they’ve almost worn me down. Almost.
The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) has issued safety recommendations to the industry following its investigation of the 2017 CSX hazmat derailment near Hyndman, Pa.
I don’t often feel the need to defend our industry’s regulator, the Federal Railroad Administration. Part of that is me. Like many who have stumbled into a career in this industry (and I literally stumbled my way into railroad employment, half-blinded and three-quarters frozen by a blizzard in Chicago), I’ve always had a problem with authority. Not that I begrudge anyone his or her authority, title, rate of pay—any of that stuff. I just don’t like other people telling me what to do, and I positively hate it when others think they need to tell me what to do.
I chuckle sometimes these days. Chuckling, in some circles is considered to be an indication of maturity, of wisdom. Those circles don’t include me, and they don’t mean me. Chuckling is that kind of half-wry, half-sad, half-surprised, half-jaded response—and that’s two many halves.
FINANCIAL EDGE, RAILWAY AGE SEPTEMBER 2019 ISSUE: On Aug. 14, the ESPN show ¿Highly Questionable? showed a video clip of a skateboarder sliding underneath a moving passenger locomotive, riding the rail on the skateboard and then sliding back out from underneath the train before the second wheelset (1). (The clip can be seen starting at about 16:30 into the video.) The hosts were suitably shocked and aghast over the audacity of the act of sliding underneath a locomotive and unsurprisingly thoughtless about the carelessness of the rider.