Washington Post
Amtrak Train Was Going 106 mph On A 50 mph Track
The Amtrak train that derailed here Tuesday night was traveling 106 mph, more than twice the authorized speed, as it approached a sharp bend in the tracks, the National Transportation Safety Board said Wednesday.
The engineer applied the emergency brakes, but the action was too late. The train was still moving at 102 mph when it hit the curve about three seconds later and the engine and all seven cars derailed.
“It takes a long time to decelerate a train,” NTSB board member Robert Sumwalt said. “You’re supposed to enter the curve at 50 miles per hour.”
The derailment of the Washington-to-New York train killed seven people, injured more than 200 and disrupted service in the busiest passenger rail corridor in the country.
Walking Used To Be A Top Spectator Sport
“Grand Female Walking Match,” announced the ad for Kernan’s theater in the Washington Star. “Six days, 12 hours daily. From 12 noon to 12 midnight. Admission to all 25 cts.” It may sound as boring as a congressional committee meeting, but in the spring of 1889, Washington was entranced by a series of “pedestrian tournaments” at Kernan’s, a theater on the northeast corner of 11th and C streets NW, where Federal Triangle stands today.
The races were the brainchild of James Lawrence Kernan, a Confederate soldier who became an entertainment mogul after the Civil War. Kernan hoped to capitalize on a craze that had begun a decade earlier. At the original Madison Square Garden in New York, endurance walking matches were wildly popular beginning in the late 1870s. Crowds of 10,000 or more regularly packed the rickety arena to watch men and women circle a one-sixth-mile track for days at a time. For a while, pedestrianism, as it came to be known, was the most popular spectator sport in the United States.
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