re: #58 Charles Johnson

Of course funding cuts in themselves didn’t cause this specific accident. But it’s incredibly obvious that the Republican Party’s hostility to Amtrak has contributed to a lack of safety features and infrastructure improvements that could have prevented it.

This is from Bill Moyers’ site:

In fact, there is a requirement that Amtrak, commuter lines and freight railroads have positive train controls in place by the end of 2015. Unfortunately, the task (and the bulk of the funding) was left to the privately run freight railroads, on whose lines Amtrak runs. Trying to implement the train control system on the cheap appears to have dramatically failed. (This article on the Eno Transportation Center website has some background.) In January, notes Gregg Levine writing for Al Jazeera, Amtrak published a newsletter in which it said it was “hopeful” that positive train control would be implemented throughout the entire Northeast Corridor by the end of the year. But in March, the acting administrator of the Federal Railroad Administration, Sarah Feinberg, told Congress that the railroad industry would miss the 2015 deadline.

Does anyone believe that if Amtrak itself had the money, that the PTC system might very well have been in place at the crash scene by now?