It took me a minute to remember that this happened in Ohio and not the Middle East.
It would be a shame if all those states sued the train company for damages.
It’s 2024. Why are trains still derailing? Surely there’s a better engineering design than this.
Rail workers do not have the proper time to fully inspect cars and arrange them in the proper order due to understaffing and the high volume created by maximized rail schedules that prioritize profits over safety.
That’s a huge reason why rail workers wanted to go on strike before there was bipartisan cooperation led by Biden to take away their labor rights.
The engineering is fine, great even. Executives have demanded that the trains run at the red line, for maximum profit. With no safety margin, when something goes wrong it goes really really wrong. That’s why it was so important to hold them accountable and so fucked that we didn’t. It’s just a matter of time until the next accident.
It’s effectively impossible to engineer around knowingly unsafe operation. The trains are fine, it’s the railroads operating them unsafely and the state and federal governments refusing to maintain infrastructure that is the problem.
i wish the govt was in charge of maintaining the infrastructure, and i wish the govt owned the infrastructure then prioritized passenger traffic over freight so we could get some semblance of a working regional rail system.
I dunno. You never hear about high speed rail in Japan derailing, or the monorail at DisneyWorld going off the track. There was some crazy invention ages ago where a train with a gyroscope actually traveled on a single rail. We’ve got to do better than this.
Yeah, because they actually care about safety and put money into maintenance.
Most derailments happen due to operational error such as too much speed for the track (preventable with ATC), equipment failure (preventable with better inspection and maintenance) or external factors like a car on the tracks (not really preventable without major gate upgrades).
The only real technological innovations are automated train systems, but that technology already exists, we just don’t use it in the US because the private rail operators make more money by cutting corners, not spending on upgrades.
Thats line saying why are bridges still collapsing
Because zero effort has been put into maintenance!
Boats still sink, planes and cars still crash. Fundamentally, transportation will fail. The question is are these failures within an acceptable rate due to unforseen issues, or is this a problem with the system that operates and profits off of these devices, letting safety slip to maximize profit?
So nice that before this happened, the railworkers wanted to strike duets safety concerns and understaffed Railroads. All to keep them from taking days off and lowering profits.
Good old Joe Biden (friend to the working man) denied the strike request because interfering with Christmas shipping would be a problem.
I think the railworkers should have called his bluff and all off the job. Unlike Reagan and the Air Traffic Strike, the military can’t just take over those jobs. He couldn’t replace the entire unionized jobs like the AIR Force could take over flight operators.
And then they negotiated behind the scenes and got most of what they wanted without a strike. The part that anti Biden posters conveniently leave out every time they bring this up
For roughly half the unions. The Rail companies gave a ton of stuff to their IT department and everyone called it a win to save face. Meanwhile the guys on the trains themselves are only sporadically getting wins. The points system that automatically fires people for being sick notably still exists which means one of the core complaints, (people literally falling over dead on the job because they worked through being sick) is unaddressed. As is the low staffing numbers on the actual trains and maintenance crews. To be clear a bunch of those guys officially have sick days now, but the points system will still deduct points if they miss a duty call that day.
Is it in the contract?
If it ain’t in the contract it ain’t for shit,
