Page 31 - Train System News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

Money. they have a point on one level; amtrak gets a ton of money. you've dumped so much money into it and still haven't gotten the safety equipment you were supposed to get. that speaks to money maybe not being the answer. you keep saying you need more but maybe you just need to do better. >> well the federal government spends $1.4 billion a year on amtrak. and as i pointed out the northeast corridor, which is the busiest part of our nation's passenger rail system the one that spreads from washington to boston 750,000 people a day ride it. and it has had steady year over year improvements the...

Medical situation. you'd have a back up person in there. and another question is given the way these derailments took place, what happened to the passengers? we just heard one of them they went flying. why don't we have seatbelts? we have them in automobiles, trucks planes. as far as cars i said this last timen on the air, we have over 2,000 crashes a year on trains hitting automobiles or trucks and the irony is that many of these could be prevented if you had the automatic train system that i discussed earlier in place because the signal would have gone to the automotive and to the engineer a...

They plan to cut amtrak's funding every single year and you can't draw a straight line between the funding and the disaster we saw the other night. what you can say, though, is that we have systemically done a terrible job funding not just amtrak, but american infrastructure. amtrak in particular you have incredibly strong ridership in that corridor. but because we have not figured out what with want that train system to be, we take money from the corridor and use it to subsidize. then congress gets furious because it doesn't make enough money. you can't have a world class rail system and infr...

The engineer was high on drugs. you can get all sorts of problems. the train system is getting more automated and that's positive train control. and that can eliminate a category of accidents but at the moment we don't know what category this accident is in. >> uh-huh. mary, you want to talk about that? >> and matthew's exactly right. positive train control is something that gives the train and the conductor and the people working on the track, anyone in relationship with the train and track, gives them information about where the train is on the track and what else is on the track and it uses...

Amarillo, texas! you you. >> you got it! >> i want to bring in meteorologist bill karins. are we seeing the worst of it there? >> it can't any more difficult. we have a hard enough time pronouncing everything around the country. as far as ocean side and san diego, you're the two next spots that have yet to see the bad weather in california. l.a. is starting to lighten up a little bit. the heaviest rain moved through. the threat of the mudslides will be getting reduced as we go throughout the rest of the afternoon. now as far as the december goes now we're starting to add the totals up and we'r...