by NH2060
Wow. When I thought nothing could get worse on MNR this happens. One news report says the third rail went right into the first car. Just awful
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Moderators: GirlOnTheTrain, nomis, FL9AC, Jeff Smith
R36 Combine Coach wrote:This might be rather early, but will this be a rallying cry by officials to ban road crossings on third rail trackage (forcing grade eliminations)? LIRR, MNCR's Upper Harlem Line and CTA are the only agencies with such features.Completely agree, but will they source the $ to work on grade eliminations in the near future (I'd give it a maybe-35% chance)? Unless the NTSB or other gov't agency cracks down on road crossings and/or the MNRR, I wouldn't expect there to be a mass-movement to eliminate all grade crossings (In third rail territory).
Head-end View wrote:So of course the idiot news stations are comparing this incident to the December 2013 Spuyten Duyvil crash, as if there were any similarity between the two incidents. Ignorance and sensationalism at its best (or worst).
Chessie GM50 wrote:Prepare to hear nothing but ill-informed rhetoric from people who didn't know the Harlem line even existed until today.
pnaw10 wrote:Hopefully other media outlets take that into consideration before speculating against the engineer, the crossing signals, or "filling time" with a recap of MNR's history.This is hardly the time to be thinking about optics. The facts will come out with time. Six fewer passengers walked away from that train than originally boarded it, it's hardly something to try and trivialize or downplay...
Authorities said the SUV's driver had gotten out of her vehicle momentarily after the crossing's safety gates came down around her. She then got back in and was trying to drive forward when she was hit, they said.
The third rail, which powers the railroad, breached the train’s interior Tuesday. An explosion blasted flames into the front two cars of the train along with the vehicle on the tracks, a black Jeep Cherokee that had stopped at a crossing on Commerce Street, officials said.EDIT: Thanks, Jeff, was trying to force myself to go to sleep, so I neglected to add the context to which my question was asked.
dnelson wrote:Two immediate questions come to mind: if this train was led by a typical locomotive or some sort of passenger-less spacer instead of MU cars with passengers sitting beginning directly behind the cab, would any passengers have died? If this train wasn't powered via third rail which ignited the fire, would any passengers have died? I'm not actively criticizing third rail powered MUs, but this is a horrifying number of deaths for what appears to be an otherwise typical grade crossing accident.There are multiple reasons why the leading cars have passengers: (1) you will need extra track length at Grand Central for that car (not necessarily platform, but track), (2) maintaining yet another type of car costs money (more than you think) and every timethey break and you do not have such a car as a spare you will need to cancel the train, (3) operating a non-revenue car (actually 2 of them on each end) costs money to move the dead weight back and forth (again a lot more than you think), (4) when people are crowding in the rest of the cars you will get political pressure to let them in these "spacer" cars to alleviate the crowding. The reality is that it is much cheaper and effective to grade-separate (but it is still tons of $$$ which nobody is willing to pay to get done) and then there is the NIMBY.