Here's some interesting reading from people that are shockingly out of touch.
https://www.railwayage.com/safety/ntsb- ... tatements/
https://www.railwayage.com/safety/wsdot ... trainsets/
Some great material from the articles:
"WSDOT (Washington State DOT) said it “will work with Amtrak to follow the NTSB recommendation to remove the [Cascades service] Talgo Series 6 trainsets from service as soon as possible.”
Despite the fact that:
“the NTSB had never, until now, recommended removal of an entire class of equipment"
and
"the Talgo Series VI was in compliance with all FRA regulations. While compliance with one of them was ‘grandfathered,’ that particular requirement had no relevance in this accident. FRA Administrator Ron Batory’s letter ... confirms that point."
And here's the real stroke of genius. Read this very carefully:
"The requirement for which FRA provided ‘grandfathering’ for the Talgo Series VI was for 49 CFR 238.203, Static End Strength. This requirement for the car to support an 800,000-pound buff load on the ‘line of draft without permanent deformation’
originated from a ca. 1912 U.S. Post Office regulation requiring Railway Post Office cars to be designed for ‘400,000 pounds of buff on line of draft at half yield.’ The later change to 800,000 pounds without yield, which is essentially the same requirement, made it testable. That the application was to be ‘on line of draft’ was
because the wooden cars of the day(3) may (or may not) have had a steel center sill, but certainly had no other structure to support the load"
Take a minute to digest that. What you're reading is the the FRA collision requirement was based on a USPS rule for wooden RPO's. It does not take into account the fact that a 1912 RPO does not carry passengers, was made of wood, moves at about 40mph, was operated for a now-irrelevant agency over jointed rail with little ballast by railroads that are no longer with us pulled by steam engines and coupled with link-pins.
I mean can you make this up??? This was bad law in 1940 let alone 2020.
This might qualify as the utterly stupidest thing out of Washington since the $400 toilet seats.
The new Acela: It's not Aveliable.