Greg Moore wrote:8th Notch wrote:l008com wrote:boomer wrote:It is believed that the engineer thought he was elsewhere along the route. How he became unaware of exactly where he was can only be guessed at this point. More details will obviously become available in time.
I've often wondered about this. Rail ROWs have no lighting and minimal signage, compared to a traditional highway. It seems like something that could happen pretty easily at night? I know I've had it happen to me driving on the highway at night some times, and even riding my bike at night. It certainly seems plausible? Any engineers here want to chime in on this specific subtopic? I'd be curious to hear.
Knowing your territory whether it's day, night, foggy, snowing is part of the job no excuses. The locomotives have headlights as well as every CAT pole has a number on it designating milepost location. Whether or not the engineer here had a medical condition or brain fart which caused him to become disoriented is a possibility however "I didn't know where I was" alone is not a valid reason PERIOD.
While I agree 99%, we're also talking an area of human factors that we're still learning a lot about.
As others have said, it's like commuting to work. After you've done it 100 times, it becomes rote and if you asked most folks 5 minutes after they got to work to name any details about their drive they're unlikely to remember them. The more we do something, the less brain activity is required to handle it. (Think about driving in a new city for the first time where you may turn off the radio, shush everyone in the car and be hyper-vigilant, etc vs driving in your hometown where you may have the radio on, talking to others and only have one hand on the steering wheel.)
This is not to excuse the engineer, but simply to point out it's not necessarily as easy as saying, "he should have been paying attention". The brain is a pretty funny thing.
Regarding the commute to work... it doesn't take too long before you know every turn, every place you need to slow down, every building you see as land marks, every pothole location, etc. It almost becomes second nature and you don't even think about it. Even when I rode as a passenger as a commuter on a train for 8 or 9 years you knew where and when the phase gaps would occur, every place curve, every place the train would speed up or slow down, where every stop was, the order of stations, etc. I'm wondering if it will turn out being something like the metro north crash of a few years ago.. wasn't it fatigue and an undiagnosed case of sleep apnea? I guess we'll hear more as the details come out. My thoughts and prayers are with the passengers, crew and first responders.
After talking about this crash a bit with my Dad, he mentioned that my grandfather was a passenger on the 1951 crash in Woodbridge that killed 85 people. He can recall the tense hours after hearing of the crash not knowing whether his father was ok or not. It took a number of hours before my grandfather could find / get to a payphone and call home. He was in one of the cars that dangled off of a bridge. Pretty scary!
