Page 245 - Acceleration News Today

The locomotive itself. this is the train brake. this controls the brakes on the train itself. the headlight switch is here. and this is the belt switch. then the horn right here. >> okay. now that youve been to through that let me back you up to the first thing i think you pointed out, the accelerator. now that we know this train did accelerate, i want you to show me exactly how one would accelerate a train. were trying to figure out how this could have happened going there this curve. >> so in ...

His 80s and never gave up his spirit to play the blues. music icons are tweeting their condolences lenny kravitz tweeted b.b. anyone could play. lee brice said, my heart just broke into a million pieces. not enough space to describe my feelings of the man. legend, pure teach. >> brian, elisabeth, back to you. >> trace their roots back to him. >> thats a story that was breaking yesterday. this story has been breaking all week long. fatal acceleration right now we have comes from that am tack trai...

Miles per hour and 12 seconds later the train hit 90 miles per hour and 15 seconds after that it topped 100 miles per hour. thats when the engineer bostian, slammed on the brakes. what could it mean? with me now, peter goelz. based on what we know and your experience at the ntsb what could the sudden acceleration mean? >> thats why the interview with the engineer will be so quickly. its not a cross-examination, and its not a adversarial situation. the ntsb doesnt work like that. they will ask, w...

Claw what they call them, massive structures up and down the corridor. its a big, big job. theyll continue to work through the weekend. they hope to be back up and running full force tuesday. >> thank you so much tom. joining me now is a veteran amtrak locomotive engineer and officer who operated trains on the exact route. thank you very much for being with us today. first of all, what conditions could explain this acceleration? >> well, the -- let me start by saying this is my route. this is th...

Person that can control the speed of the train. >> reporter: the engineer that night was 32-year-old brandon bostian. the ntsb says now as he approached one of the most dangerous curves in the corridor, he wasnt slowing down. he was speeding up. 70 miles per hour a minute before impact then 80, and 90. 16 seconds before the curve, the train is going exactly twice the speed limit 100 miles an hour and there was no way a train could make that curve at that speed. >> this is a relatively new train....

Today. were learning the train was accelerating before the engineer hit the brake moments before he hit the curve before the train derailed. tom costello is in philadelphia. youve been all over this story all week. what have we learned today about the train and the conditions leading into that acceleration and the braking and the fact he was going twice as fast as would have been expected going into the curve. >> reporter: yeah, couple of things. first of all, one headline is nbc news has learne...

Was his second journey of the day? >> he does -- was that his second journey of the day? the answer is its one round trip. he starts in the early afternoon washington -- excuse me, new york, washington, back to new york. so its one round trip. >> how much time is between that? >> how much time is between that? we will have his schedule. i dont have it immediately in front of me. as ive often said we are here to get information that will go away with the passage of time. his schedule, we can get ...

Regardless of what the cause of take acceleration was. so this is something that had not been implemented or at least installed on this part of the track. officials at this point, though continue their investigation here. they are looking for some key pieces of evidence and more importantly still looking for perhaps some of those that have not yet been identified. >> all right. thanks so much. lets talk more about that safety technology. sgerpt experts say that may have prevented this tragedy. t...

An acceleration. >> no. i cant -- you know at that point you want to accelerate to a point where youre going to get into your next curve. but you would hit the brake again to go around the curve at the junction there. so thats a question of having to really know the physical characteristics of that route and i dont. but i mean its like taking off with a plane. you take off, the pilot gives it everything youve got to get off the runway. but once you reach the speed you want you throttle off. so t...

Train to see did we have a runaway train was it the acceleration not under the operators control. >> and that can be determined -- >> yes, that can be determined. and locomotives today are mini computers. there are computers all over them, running systems and we have a memory on these computers. not designed to be part of an investigation, but if you have nonvolatile memory, it will retain whatever settling it had, and data it contained after the power was removed so that is another possible sou...