Saturday, February 10, 2018

Off The Rails

Amtrak has had two major incidents since the chartered train carrying Republican members of Congress to their annual retreat crashed with a garbage truck in Virginia.  First, an Amtrak train collided with a freight train in South Carolina, killing two Amtrak employees and injuring a hundred passengers.  Now, this past Tuesday,  an Acela train - an Acela train - malfunctioned when two passenger cars separated while the train was traveling 124 miles an hour through Maryland.  None of the 52 passengers (the paltry number of passengers indicates how few people are wiling to take their lives into their hands on Amtrak these days) were injured.
And to think that trains in Germany, Italy and Japan, the defeated nations of World War II - not to mention trains in France, which was the only major country on the winning side of World War II to surrender - go faster than the Acela without having an incident like this!   
Now that's separation anxiety! :-O
People walk through this inter-car connection, you know.  Fortunately, not this time. 
I'm going to have a hard time rooting for Team USA in the Winter Olympics when I know they're representing a country that can't make the trains run period, let alone on time.  How is it that Elon Musk can send a car into space (and he did that because???) but we can't send a bullet train from Washington to Boston in one piece?  
I remember when I cheered wildly when Martin O'Malley told Rachel Maddow in a 2016 Democratic presidential forum that were were capable of building high-speed rail and sending a manned mission to Mars.  It seems that he was wrong, and that we're not capable of doing either.  
Maybe we can send a Tesla to Mars . . ..

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