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Hello I'm new..Questions about safety?
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[QUOTE]Originally posted by Amtrak207: [QB] Thanks for asking! I knew all this civil engineering stuff would pay off someday. Concrete bridges are reinforced with steel, otherwise they would fall apart. (concrete is useless in tension.) They are not favored for extremely long spans due to far higher weight (dead load) than steel spans. Bridge inspection happens. Railroads understand how important such a structure is, and inspect them regularly. Not only would a bridge failure be a safety risk, but it would disrupt their business and cost loads of money to replace. Although railroads cannot afford to repaint their bridges as often as the highway folks, be assured there are tons of standards they have to meet. Plus, railroad bridges are redundant, meaning that if one component should fail, it will not lead to global collapse, or collapes of the entire structure. (Take that, Scoharie Creek!) Bridge failures are so incredibly rare, and when they do happen they are not the graphic, all-collapsing-at-once dramatization on the movies. Steel is ductile, and steel bridges are designed with that in mind. This means that when things start to go wrong, it will be noticeable by the users (leaning column, yielding beam, excessive deflection, resonance) before things get scary or even remotely dangerous. Even more (this is going to be a horrendously long post), railroad bridges come from an era when everything was overbuilt beyond belief. Sure, it wasted material here and there, but what you get is more than your fifty-year lifespan roadway bridge. You get something that could literally last hundreds of years. With regard to the Sunset Limited, the question is not how many people actually survived that wreck. That's saying half empty. There were over 200 people on that train. The towboat operator became lost in fog and hit one of the piers, pushing the bridge out of alignment. That's a serious impact. (As a result of that accident, the Coast Guard has improved poor-weather visibility of bridges, especially important ones like rail bridges, among other things.) News reports do a horrible job with train wrecks and gain ratings by showing jacknifed equipment and interviewing injured passengers while pure speculation about what happened trundles over the audio track. While the whole train goes on the ground, and it looks bad, they are supposed to go sideways like that to dissipate energy. Case and point: Batavia, 1994. Lakeshore goes down an embankment. Zero fatalities, 25 serious injuries, 100 or so minor injuries (broken bones, lacerations), 240 people walked away, by far the majority. They rolled a dome car. 90,000 pounds of railcar go sideways then roll over on a glass-covered observation deck. Damage? The glass shatters and stays in place (made from the same stuff as hockey boards but 3/8 of an inch thick) and the roof dents down nine inches. "Safer even than an SUV" give me a break, that's not hard to do. American passenger trains indeed have incredible crush resistance. An American passenger car has to sustain three times the compressive force on its corner, three times more than the TGV or Eurostar or any european railcar. Summary: it is THE SAFEST way to go. With the exception of the Sunset in 1993 and a grade crossing accident in 1999, Amtrak passenger fatalities per year have numbered in the single digits throughout the 1990s. Amtrak positions baggage, mail, and crew cars at the front and rear of the trainset to act as a safety buffer. While the chances of hitting water are slim to nil on a train, imagine how comfortable it is without 45,000 feet of air between your airliner and the ground. I also konw some operating crews on a first-name basis. Despite all the flaming that goes on with this board, these people put safety above everything else. I do not hesitate to entrust them with my safety. The "Water Level Route" does indeed follow some waterways, in particular the Hudson, and Mohawk rivers (beautiful) and the Erie Canal (want pictures?) but they are not crammed right up on the bank all the time. And airliners are made out of Aluminum (E=17000 ksi). Speaking of which, I have to stop typing and go to sleep. I have a steel design test tomorrow. My fingers are tired, so I'm almost done. Please, please, please tell me when you're riding the Lakeshore. I'll stop by and say hello. The safest way to go. By a long shot. Not to mention being able to walk around, seeing the country as it really is, being kinder to the environment, dot dot dot. [/QB][/QUOTE]
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