Railway Accidents
One Foot in the Gravy
Railway Accidents
We’ve all been missing the headline. Transportation Secretary Mayor Pete let slip during a live mic moment that the accident in East Palestine, Ohio, isn’t a big deal.
There are a thousand rail accidents a year in the U.S.
The United States depends on three separate systems for transportation of incoming freight: Ships, which generally offload to rail, which generally offloads to trucks. While there may be more than one truck involved, final delivery is almost always by truck. The lion’s share of the work is done by rail, moving vast amounts of cargo. There are about 137,000 miles of rail track in the U.S. That would mean that there’s an accident every 137 miles each year.
I didn’t think it was possible, but the ladies of The View on ABC managed to blame this on Trump. After all, his administration eased on train brakes, and since this area of Ohio voted for him, they deserved this. If we ignore the fact that no one deserves being inundated with phosgene, the problem with regulations this statement is that the brakes had nothing to do with the accident. The National Transportation Safety Board has already ruled that the problem was with the axle bearings and not the brakes.
When Joe Biden was sworn in as President, the national debt was $27.76 Trillion. Today it stands at $31.5 Trillion. The spending during his first two years has totaled $3.5 Trillion above the budgets, themselves filled with pork and waste.
In all this money, was there still not enough to keep poor Americans from being subjected to chemical warfare?
In safety speak, I have a feeling that a train "derailment" is anything where there's even the slightest slip. There are certainly not 1,000 East Palestines every year.
Thank you for the information about the brakes. I didn't know they had determined that wasn't it.
And you're right that with all that money, we should be able to help the people of Ohio, but I'd say we also should have been able to make the rails safer.
I am rather bitterly grateful for everything that exposes people's true natures. These past three years have done more to do that than a century of normal time.
Transiting from anger to sorrow--we have a lot of rails-to-trails work up here and it's an unhappy reminder of how much we lose when we lose the facilities supporting travel by train. Such a lovely mode of getting around and being able to see and enjoy so much while we do so.