Submission statement: Some days ago, I submitted a similar article to this sub. I decided to submit this new article, because it contains updated information.:

>In a statement, Norfolk Southern pushed back on the claim that the derailed train was immediately put back into service.
“Immediately following the derailment, the locomotives and uninvolved leading cars were moved from the derailment site to one of our facilities,” the company wrote. “This movement did not overwrite the videos. The locomotives were held there for NTSB inspection. Following release by the NTSB days later, the locomotives were returned to normal service. Because these cameras run continuously, information not collected prior to release was overwritten in the normal course of activity.”

PS: 15 minutes before and 5 minutes after the derailment is still available.

They put the train engine right back in service!!!!! Well that’s convenient.

Oops!

Sounds more like tampering with evidence to me.

It is funny how this sort of thing seems to happen in high profile cases. Jeffrey Epstein comes to mind.

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The engineers were probably sleeping.

My biodad was a Conrail engineer in the early 80s and would air out all of his grievances to my mom especially when his coworkers would constantly sleep no matter how long or short the trip was and when it was his turn to rest he would wake to find everyone else asleep.

Alice's restaurant?

Nothing to see

Now that guy was a serious head case. He had mark Zuckerberg ddos the prison so he could kill himself peacefully and strategically. Wow. Smart guy. Big brains. Had it all and gave it all for his country.

Modern locomotives are equipped with a dual safety mechanism, one for the conductor and one for the engineer, that requires each to press a button at a separate interval.

It sounds like NTSB didn't collect the evidence when they had the chance.

>Immediately following the derailment, the locomotives and uninvolved
leading cars were moved from the derailment site to one of our
facilities,” the company wrote. “This movement did not overwrite the
videos. The locomotives were held there for NTSB inspection. Following
release by the NTSB days later, the locomotives were returned to normal
service.

Basically every NVR, Dashcam or Bodycam works like this. It only has X amount of space so it keeps the most recent and overwrites the oldest data once it hits a low amount of free space on the drive. NTSB should have collected that as soon as they had access to the train.

Yes, what is also interesting is that they don't have a backup system uploaded to a cloud of some sort. I'm sure as a big company like that they record for a reason i.e. accidents/ lawsuits. I wonder if a look at past lawsuits/reports could prove otherwise, because this definitely isn't the first derailment.

Wow that's so weird it just disappeared

At some point I can't continue to believe this is incompetence. They have money to pay off politicians, so I'm sure they pay the regulators too. I guess it's too much to expect anyone will have charges filed against them for destroying evidence.

Imagine that!!

Ok I’ll bite. Let’s say the entire crew was sleeping. How does that change what happened here? Do you think the crew being awake or asleep when the wheel melted off makes a difference somehow?

Agree, with any past incidents I'm sure to protect yourself from a company stand point they'd put a policy in place for this exact thing. They are like a corporate mafia, another train derailed somewhere else today.

So in other words yet another company that gets off Scott free.

Cloud systems aren't really feasible for something like this. It would require uploading over LTE/5G and would eat a metric crap ton of data across their entire fleet as they are running those trains basically 24/7/365.

I'm not disagreeing with you, i just find it odd. Being that they do know it only records for so long, i wonder if they have an established policy in-house on collecting that since it could be so vital.

You can batch the upload while you're in the rail yard.

But uploading to a cloud makes sense too. With all the diesel in the locomotive, the local storage is at risk during an incident.

The local storage can be redundant SSDs inside of a fire proof enclosure like the "black box" airplanes have. From all of the derailments I have seen in the news in the past few years, i don't think I have seed a locomotive being destroyed.

Batch upload at the rail yard would be probably a huge infrastructure project, especially in remote areas with shitty internet. You'd have to place access points all over the yard, run fiber back to a central point, and then have a large amount of bandwidth for a train to upload say 2 days worth of footage from multiple cameras in 1080-4k resolution in under whatever the time it takes them to switch their loads and leave the yard.

But again, none of that matters if NTSB doesn't do their job and actually download the footage when they have the chance. Any cloud / remote backup is going to have a retention window as well where they would delete footage.

What regulators is my question?

I agree it’s not incompetence but it may be it’s nefarious cousin-underfunded regulators. If their just aren’t enough staff to do the right thing, it serves the same purpose as bribing officials and it’s been the trend In government since Reagan. If you can’t outright get rid of a regulatory body, neuter it by underfunding it and understaffing. That way everything is “working” but is ineffective furthering the public’s doubt in government agencies

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It sounds like their policy was to flag the footage of the incident (the 15 mins before until 5 mins after). They still have that part.

It seems like NTSB now wants all of it but they could have had it if they had done their job.

Its kind of funny because I was just watching some reruns of the first 48 with my wife the other day and the detectives on that show, no matter the department always go for video first thing from businesses, ring cameras, etc because they know it disappears the longer you wait. Why a federal agency investigating a major ecological disaster didnt do the same is beyond me.

This is by far the best, most comprehensive answer.

The jaws of capitalism must continue to devour us and our planet unhindered

>There are no regulations that mandate the preservation of recordings on U.S. freight trains, even when trains derail and cause damage

Well, it sounds like that's that.

hard to hang a train

Trucking companies do it everyday.

Sounds a lot like 18.5 minutes of missing 1970s-era tape to me.

Railroad companies never lost their 19th century "I'm bigger than the law" arrogance.

> too much to expect anyone will have charges filed

some schlub somewhere might take the fall if they can prove that he made some technical mistake somewhere but yeah, the people who collect 100% of the money when the trains run correctly will see 0% of the responsibility when the trains poison a town.

This. You don't bribe regulators, that's dirty and more importantly, people understand that it's dirty. What you do is "donate" to politicians in such a way that they understand that your donation is contingent upon them loosening regulations and hamstringing the regulators. It still has the same effect, your business doesn't have to pay pesky safety costs or lawsuits after you kill a bunch of people, but this way it's all above board legally speaking and you at least have the veneer of being able to tell people that the system is working.

Why the hell wouldn't they collect that evidence!?!?!?

To be fair the engine wasn't affected.

LocoCam video use to be recorded and saved in several different files. Not sure how it could have been overwritten. Something like this would have been uploaded at the rail yard. At least with GE locomotives they are always reporting home back in Erie or Texas.

Incompetence apparently