Surely you’ve heard about this already, but it seems Friday’s version of Amtrak’s inbound Pere Marquette train attempted to recreate the end of the movie Silver Streak, but was interrupted well before crashing through the walls of Union Station by a Norfolk Southern stack train. The leading P42 rode up on the last stack car and came to a rest with the remainder of the train on the rails. It is now looking like the engineer may have been speeding, though, the formal investigation is far from over. Several people were injured, some severely, but everyone’s been released from the hospital by now, just in time to begin filing the rash of lawsuits that is sure to come.
At first, from the original news photos, we were wondering how the engineer missed seeing that train stopped directly ahead, but the following video makes it a little clearer.
That could have been a lot worse, what with the two moving trains on either side of the Amtrak/freight collision. We’re lucky the passenger cars didn’t come off the rails.
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I can see how the engineer could have not seen the stack train until it was too late, but what the hell was he doing in that block going faster than restricted speed?
Either engineer screwed up big time, or something went wrong with the signaling/dispatching that lead him to believe he was clear to move at track speed.
Good thing it was a stack train and not a tank train.