History of Philadelphia derailment to Frankford Junction

The locomotive drove towards New York and dragged seven Amtrak Car cars by Port Richmond on a warm and dark spring evening, To speed up the pace because the speed limit decreased.

Radio Chatter – children had thrown stones into a septa train and injured an engineer – catch the ear of the Amtrak engineer.

The train that he steeled, Amtrak Train 188, accelerated to 106 miles per hour in a 50-mile zone and led to a dangerous curve to Frankford Junction.

The train hit the curve on May 12, 2015 at 9:21 p.m. and the engineer hit the emergency brakes.

A violent vibration re -enacted in the series of train cars when the passengers observed Netflix on their laptops and had maintained on the phone with spouses and came across their iPad games.

And then these devices – as well as wallet and glasses and shoes – went in the air.

“It just tended to go around a sharp curve,” said passenger Mary Barcello from New York and described her experience in the night of the crash, “and then it just turned all the way.”

The train cars spilled from the route and drove to the ground. People were thrown against windows and thrown into overhead luggage stands. Railway cars are built to protect the passengers from the front, but not against lateral movements.

When the scene settled, screams rose from the mass of the mutilated metal. The passengers were able to smell burned rubber, and when they moved, they could feel the glass crisp.

Police officers who arrived at the scene did not wait for ambulances, shoveled injured drivers and drove them to their patrol cars and cars to hospitals, while Septa buses drove groups to the nearby trauma centers. In the middle of the chaos, the patients were unevenly distributed over the city's medical facilities.

It was all for the deadliest northeast corridor rail in a generation. Eight passengers of the 253 people on board were killed and more than 150 injured. Amtrak estimated his damage to more than 30.84 million US dollars. And in one of the largest Bail crash settlements in the history of US history, the agency agreed to pay 265 million US dollars for the derailment of victims.

The National Transportation Safety Board carried out years of examination. The report came to the conclusion that the engineer lost his camp when he accelerated into the curve, probably because he was distracted by the radio. He probably believed that he was on a distance beyond the curve, which had a speed limit of 110 miles per hour.

The report called it a loss of “situation awareness”. Attempts to raise criminal charges against the engineer were ultimately unsuccessful, and a jury was not guilty of causing a catastrophe, eight charges of the involuntary manslaughter and almost 250 cases of ruthless danger.

“The world of the engineer is one of the fallible human decisions and actions in an imperfect environment,” said Christopher Hart, chairman of NTSB, in 2016.

And the structure of the train cars didn't help. When the silver chain fell on the sides, the windows didn't go. Four of the deaths were Passengers who died after he was ejected.

The engineers quickly found that a positive train control – an automatic brake system that slows down or continues a train to prevent an accident if an engineer does not do so – would have prevented derailing if it had been installed on train 188.

In the years since then, a positive train control was installed in all Amtrak ownership or controlled trains, and cars were equipped with harder windows.

Eli Kulp, the famous fork chef who was paralyzed in the crash, described the fights with his mental health, alcohol and his loss of identity after derailing.

“Everything I want to do is standing on the pass, eating a plate and looking at the faces of the guests. … That was my identity for 27 years,” he told the restaurant critic Craig Laban in 2020.