US train in deadly wreck was speeding: Investigators
PHILADELPHIA - The Associated Press
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The Amtrak passenger train that crashed in Philadelphia, killing at least seven people, was hurtling at 170 kph before it ran off the rails along a sharp curve where the speed limit drops to just 50 80 kph, federal investigators said om May 13.It was the deadliest U.S. train accident in nearly seven years. It happened along Amtrak’s busy Northeast Corridor, between Washington and Boston, where the national passenger railway carries 11.6 million passengers a year. The train’s engineer applied the emergency brakes moments before the crash but slowed the train to only 164 kph by the time the locomotive’s black box stopped recording data, said Robert Sumwalt, of the National Transportation Safety Board. The speed limit just before the bend is 128 kph, he said.
The engineer, whose name was not released, refused to give a statement to law enforcement and left a police precinct with a lawyer, police said. Sumwalt said federal accident investigators want to talk to him but will give him a day or two to recover from the shock of the accident.
Mayor Michael Nutter said there was “no way in the world” the engineer should have been going that fast into the curve.