I'm going to reverse myself and allow for this post to go through. Please don't mistake my generosity, as I won't do this again!
Am I correct in assuming you will post my response?
I asked the question, and while I think that the response was weak, of course I'm going to let your post go through.
My question is, you're all upset over rail safety and this accident in California with Metrolink. Where is your outrage for the carnage on the highways, the Metrolink crash killed less than 0.1% of the number of people killed on our highways? Why aren't you concerned about that?
Who says I'm not concerned? Is this thread the place to talk about it? Wouldn't you ban it for being irrelevant?
No one says that you're not concerned, but you seem to be devoting an unusual amount of time, effort, and energy towards bad mouthing rail for reasons that still remain unclear. No ones ignores mounds of evidence from an impartial agency whose only job is to determine what went wrong without an agenda. So again, I was curious if you devote this much time and effort to getting speed limits lowered on our highways so as to save lives there as you've spent trying to put trains down.
As for why it is significant, first, simply because I've been very polite and tolerant with you. It's nice to answer others questions when they've been busy answering yours.
Maybe it's only due to the limited number of "volunteer" moderators you have, but my posts seem to be delayed unduly, and, typically, are promptly buried by responses, some overly verbose, some misleading, some insulting, and most curiously, nearly ALL antagonistic to some degree. In my view, the only post which even ATTEMPTED to answer the questions in my original post was #424 by George Harris, to whom I responded in #425. I have no interest in irrelevancies, rabbit holes or ad hominem attacks. I have seen some of my questions asked by others on other forums, and they are often subjected to the same tactics.
Well again, a few of the staff have already suggested (along with several members) that we cut you off. So much of the burden for approving your posts has fallen to me, and as I've noted more than once, I've been out riding trains from one coast to the other, as well as leading our annual get together for our members in Seattle. That said, you're posts are only sitting perhaps a bit longer than normal. Again, there are only 6 staff members here who aren't on all the time, and 3 of those staffers were at our event.
As for the content of posts, we allow considerable latitude here, especially compared to other forums. In fact, on some forums, you'd have been shut down after your second or third post. And you wouldn't even be allowed to post as a guest, we're one of the few forums that allows that. And when you come here posting wild & unsupported accusations, then pile on top of that a clear lack of understanding of how RR's work, I'm not exactly surprised that some treat you with disdain.
Second, it's relevant because I'm trying to understand why you are so fixated on this one accident and don't seem to care a whit about other forms of transportation that kill many more people than trains kill.
Your conclusion is unwarranted. If a local street signal was malfunctioning or worse, let's say it showed yellow over yellow and everyone had a slightly different understanding of what it meant, I would surely try and find the right people to complain to. If our local police could not communicate with the fire department, I would surely want to know WHY they couldn't use a cell phone. I have tried to provide quotes and references for my posts to the best of my ability and bandwidth. If this forum is indeed what you present it to be, you might admonish the poster who asked me "what are you, a 13-year old?" Even if I were, so what? Is it OK if I were to ask that poster "what are you, an Amtrac/PTC lobbyist/union buster"?
RailCon BuffDaddy
Let's see, to some people a yellow traffic light means accelerate so as to beat the light. To others it means slow down and get ready to stop at the light. Are you complaining about that? Are you trying to educate people about that?
Or if the speed limit is 65 MPH, why do some think that means that they can go 75 MPH or even 80 MPH? Are you doing anything about that?
As for the cell phone bit, train engineers have radios and everyone operating on a segment of track uses the same frequency. So if there is a need to communicate beyond the instructions provided by the signals, engineers can do so, as well as conductors. And of course in an emergency situation, they could use their cell phones to call for emergency assistance, assuming that they actually have a cell phone signal. Which is quite probably one of the biggest reasons that engineers don't use cell phones for communications, since there are still many places in this country were trains operate and do not have cell phone service.
I just rode the Empire Builder between Seattle & Chicago, which runs just south of the Canadian border for much of the run. I only had cell service for about 2/3rds of the time I was on that train. That other 1/3rd of the time I couldn't have made a phone call if my life depended on it. And this, along with other evidence cited earlier is why engineers do NOT use cell phones to communicate with either other trains or the dispatchers. They use their radios, because every RR has repeaters installed along the tracks to ensure radio communications are possible.
