Max,

Today, as I write this, locomotives are on the head end of the Rotem "Safety" cab cars, these are leased from BNSF as "crash test dummies", until the real or possible "problem" can be "fixed". Whatever the final finding, the earliest briefings they got on the accident, sure scared the ML Board and Management enough to do this, at least as a precaution.

Mook,

The pilot assembly may have somehow collapse, dropped, or got pushed back, at impact, or sometime after hitting the truck, and when it crossed the intersection, angling off slightly (you can see the marks in the roadway) the car "dug in" to the dirt on the other side of the Street.

Once the cab car "dug in" it spun the entire car 180 degrees, in about 150+ feet... Where it landed facing the opposite direction of travel. That's an awful lot of g's, which seems to have also flipped the other car on its side, and resulted in most of the injuries. The first shots of the front, the coupler was nowhere to be seen where it should have been. So it took a beating and got pushed up under the car. And, everybody seems to want to what happened with that.

The question I haven't had answered is did the impact with the truck do it, or possibly contact with some other obstacle, or a combination of those factors?

I know that this "set back" of things like signals and traffic islands adjacent to the ROW are a concern due to potential for hitting these obstacles, or pushing debris into these obstacles, turning a routine car on train, into a catastrophic derailment, as did indeed happen in Glendale.

This is another perfect example of a parallel rail/roadway intersection with a terrible design and a history of similar incidents of hits, and cars inadvertently turning onto the ROW, and none of the innovations like signal grade crossing integration and signalized right hand turns have been employed to prevent this. So that part of "what else could you have done" to prevent this, will be interesting, too.

If we wanted to have under two hour service to Santa Barbara on LOSSAN, I'd grade separate this whole segment, super elevate the curve up toward Camarillo, grade separate the Camarillo crossings, and put it down the center of a new 6 lane rebuilt 118, most of the way to Moorpark, and raise the speed to 110 mph from Moorpark to the east switch at Oxnard.

Imagine the potential for rail ridership and traffic relief we'd get on the 101 corridor with more frequent, minimum half hourly, under 2 hour service, to SB on LOSSAN North. That is, imagine if we'd chosen to spend a billion on something like that, instead of what we are doing with the high speed bond money now? Why that would almost be one corridor that has almost as much service as Max normally see's, even on some branch lines....

Imagine a fast, frequent, reliable and affordable rail passenger system and services folks could actually be able to use and depend on.