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.. paraphrasing: Amtrak head Wick Moorman accepts responsibility for Penn Station derailment...http://www.nj.com/traffic/index.ssf/201 ... river_home" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
pumpers wrote:.. paraphrasing: Amtrak head Wick Moorman accepts responsibility for Penn Station derailment...http://www.nj.com/traffic/index.ssf/201 ... river_home" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Deteriorated wooden ties. They knew they were bad, but were waiting for the next maintenance cycle. Should be back 100% tomorrow.
JS
JamesRR wrote:NJ Transit pays anywhere from 3 to 5 million dollars a month for usage rights on the NEC and PSNY, and also paid over $60 million last year to Amtrak for NEC upgrades. And our fares did in fact go up. So it's not a question of 'caring about safety until a ticket price goes up', it's a question of 'where is the money going?'The money is going where it is indeed supposed to be going. The general public tends to underappreciate how much money is required for maintenance even for a short segment of the NEC such as Trenton-NYP. $60 million from NJT plus say another $60 million from Amtrak does not get you far in terms of maintaining 4 track railroad corridor 60 miles long. It is easy to point to an incident such as this one and ask 'where is the money going'? The answer is that it went to maintenance in other places and prevented many other, likely much worse, incidents and accidents from happening, but unless you work for the railroad and you are indeed involved in that maintenance, you would not even know that there were other things that were deemed more likely to cause accidents and that took priority in fixing first with the limited resources the railroad has.
JamesRR wrote:They knew of the issue but were waiting until the next maintenance cycle.What Amtrak screwed up was the prioritization of the replacement of the ties, but realize that evaluating the condition of ties is inherently subjective and depends on experience. Whoever evaluated it likely thought it was less serious than it proved to be. And yes, unless a repair is designated as urgent it is usually assigned to be completed within the regular maintenance cycle. If they took care of every identified deficiency immediately there would be no day when they would be able to run regular schedule. There is a repair to be made somewhere at all times.
JamesRR wrote:They knew of the issue but were waiting until the next maintenance cycle.
What Amtrak screwed up was the prioritization of the replacement of the ties, but realize that evaluating the condition of ties is inherently subjective and depends on experience. Whoever evaluated it likely thought it was less serious than it proved to be. And yes, unless a repair is designated as urgent it is usually assigned to be completed within the regular maintenance cycle. If they took care of every identified deficiency immediately there would be no day when they would be able to run regular schedule. There is a repair to be made somewhere at all times.It's a larger issue that can be debated endlessly (e.g. cutting Amtrak's funds, politicians unable to appropriate money, etc)
Disclaimer: I do not work in railroad procurement, so my estimates are based on generally available data (such as http://www.acwr.com/economic-developmen ... ding-costs" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;) and I have tried to use reasonable lower bounds.
Any way you slice it, there was a screw up here. A defect was not caught properly and resulted in a pretty significant derailment. My earlier response was to someone who said people don't like fare hikes but insist on safety. I responded that riders have endured fare hikes, NJT pays a hefty sum to use the infrastructure, and Amtrak is failing to keep it up.
Tadman wrote:If I'm inbound to NYP today, should I be ok or should I jump to MN at Croton?You're coming in at the other end via the East River Tunnels. You should be fine.
STrRedWolf wrote:I think he meant the Hudson River Amtrak line, from Albany, which enters Penn station from the west.Tadman wrote:If I'm inbound to NYP today, should I be ok or should I jump to MN at Croton?You're coming in at the other end via the East River Tunnels. You should be fine.
