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Five days after eight people were killed in a horrific amtrak train derailment 21 people remain in the hospital some of them critically injured. today the federal railroad administration is demanding urgent changes. this afternoon it ordered amtrak to make several immediate modifications to its trains to prevent a similar tragedy. erin mclaughlin has the details. >> reporter: poppy, we're just hearing from the federal railroad administration that they are instructing amtrak to take a number of steps to improve safety along that very busy northeast corridor. it says that the following will be f...

Windshields and what was the impact of it? >> incredible. i have been reading reports in the past that in this exact same section of the track, that people had been known to throw rocks at trains in this particular section of the route. have you heard of that? >> no. i haven't heard of it but we are still very focused on the fact that this train was going 106 miles an hour. well over double what is rated during that section. >> right. >> and we have concerns that there's either human or mechanical error in this. >> yeah. and a lot of the concern is whether or not the amtrak engineer was distra...

Like automatic train control that would have slowed down the train if excessive speed was responsible and this kind of commitment is no longer a luxury or convenience if it's a necessity. >> some lawmakers have suggested that amtrak should be privatized and shouldn't be subsidized by the government any longer. is this the time to explore that seriously? >> amtrak is a public investment. and it is in the public interest of abandoning that public responsibility in my view would be rep rerehensible and irresponsible. we ought to double our commitment to increasing the reliability and safety of ou...

Obviously we're waiting to get more details here, but the initial report is that the conductor was in a 49-mile-per-hour area and he may have been going at least 118. one would think that there would be safety measures in place that would prevent someone from being able to approach that type of speed, especially on a curve. >> no, well, there's not what is known as automatic train control here. oddly enough, on a stretch of tracks before that where they were going about 115 miles an hour, there was that form of control but they had just come off from that system on to a cruder system where the...