Page 8 - Train 188 News Today

There are, given the condition of that first passenger car that i saw today. do we have a sense of how passengers were distributed through the length of the train at this point? >> thats certainly one of the things well want to do. the best that we can. its not like airlines where you have assigned seating. to the best of our ability, we want to go back and firth out where everyone was seated and correlate to the injuries sus and i think that will tell us about the crashworthiness of these cars ...

This idea of the train going over 100 miles an hour, down the tracks through northeast philly, we almost intrinsically knew as americans that that spelled catastrophe, that something was wrong with that, 100 miles per hour? 106 miles per hour? clearly that was the problem, we knew it. between the cities of barcelona and madrid, the average train speed is 154 miles per hour. trains between tokyo and asaka go 200 miles an hour. for us, the richest, most powerful nation on earth, the average train ...

A little while ago i had a chance to talk to the chief officer for systems safety for the southeastern transportation authority or septa. scott, youre the chief safety officer for septa, these tracks here, were walking by, were walking by amtraks tracks. theyre all using -- at certain times, the same sets of tracks, right? >> thats right. theres a lot of shared use, amtraks a big owner of track in this area, and septa, and a lot of freight lines use the track to move freight back and forth throu...

>> you sort of look around. the train is dark. >> i hear people first. >> what do you hear? >> people screaming, asking questions, how do we get off of here, what happened? not complete chaos, but more so shock and fear. and i looked to my left, and theres a woman in the aisle and shes bleeding from her head, and i asked her, i said, are you okay? she said, im okay, im okay, im okay. >> and then what happens? >> and then i see smoke starting to come into the car, and then thats when i got scared...

Dont rush them whats the hurry? the american people are voting with their feet people want to ride the train, amtrak ridership has been going up and up and up setting a new ridership record every year since the year 2000. even as an amtrak fan, i can tell you, the service has been getting worse, less on time more expensive with each passing year, because the system is starved of funds and not getting any younger, and is a complicated moving piece of infrastructure, and we keep not investing and ...

Hour. >> do you have trains that go up that high? >> amtrak can go faster than septa at 70 miles per hour. >> i got to see from the helicopter today, that turn which is -- it basically is close to a right angle as you can get on a train. obviously the track curves, its doing this essentially. >> whats the -- the protocol when youre making a sharp turn is the turn rated for speed also. >> the track speed will be downgraded based on the curvature of the track or other factors such as inclines and ...

It, they dont mind things the way they are now, despite the occasional apocalyptic fireball, dont rush them, whats the hurry? the american people are voting with their feet, people want to ride the train, amtrak ridership has been going up and up and up, setting a new ridership record every year since the year 2000. even as an amtrak fan, i can tell you, the service has been getting worse, less on time, more expensive with each passing year, because the system is starved of funds and not getting...

Consistently subsidize more and more special interests. what we should have been doing is subsidizing the safety of those passengers on that amtrak train yesterday. >> you have no idea, no idea what caused this accident. and to use that as a mines of supporting the last amendment. support it if you want to. >> thats appropriations committee marking up a transportation bill that cut amtrak today. were back live from philadelphia. here with me now, ed rendell, former pennsylvania governor, philade...

Just north of manhattan at a curve in the river, its called spiten ivel, its technically in the bronx. a lot more people could have been killed in that crash, the arent tracks curve is because of how close the rail line gets to the river there. when that train derailed, those cars -- see the water at the bottom of your screen. those cars went spilling toward the river. had they gone into the river, we may not just have seen blunt force trauma. we may have also seen drownings. both the metro nort...

Hospitals. many were treated for rib fractures from being tossed by the trains violent motion. nbc news has confirmed that the trains engineer was named brandon bastion. he was reportedly injured in the crash and later released from the hospital. the ntsb has not yet interviewed bastion or the trains crew. which means while we have some idea of what happened, we still dont know why. joining me now, tom kos tello. tom, the engineer has been identified. what do we know about him? what kind of lega...