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| Re: Major Amtrak derailment in Philly (1351777) | |||
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Re: Major Amtrak derailment in Philly |
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Posted by steamdriven on Wed May 13 13:46:58 2015, in response to Re: Major Amtrak derailment in Philly, posted by AlM on Wed May 13 08:34:46 2015. Towards the edge of the topic, the accident train at Spuyten Duyvil (love those place Dutch names!) nearly made it - you can see that it changed direction over 45 degrees, and some of the cars remained on what remained of the tracks. That was a 30mph posted curve and a train rolling at 82mph at the start. Given that forces scale with v^2, that train probably would have made it at 75mph, though I'd prefer not to be in the vicinity.Curve speed limits seem to have a huge margin before derailment is certain. Severe wear on wheel flanges & rails probably happens at less than the toppling-over speed. If the curve was posted for 50, a single-level passenger train could probably make it around at ~100mph, maybe with track damage. I'll take a wild guess and state that something other than speed was the immediate cause for this train to derail. |
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