It's an interesting article. It goes back to the fundamental problem we have in America of making poor investments in safety. This equipment was not the cause of the accident. Nor is there much "evidence" that suggests these lives would not have been lost, and/or sustain life threatening injuries, in a similar collision using compliant equipment.

Rotem "safety" cars, which turned out not to be so safe, if the drawbar broke away, in what should have been a relatively minor collision with a light duty truck and light farm trailer, which spun the car at 5 G's and killed the engineer, and yet, were not "banned", with far more reason from what we know from that incident in Oxnard to do so. And, until these were "fixed" ML had to put point units back on their trains.

Poor training, poor oversight, poor management, and one piss poor hoghead, who failed in a number of aspects to properly handle the train or call relevant signals, and the failure of those training to pay attention and correct his failure to respond to the upcoming speed restriction on the curve, which is what caused the accident with the Talgos. And, yes, in perfect "hindsight" waiting three months to have the PTC working properly would have prevented even this guy from screwing up this badly... Which is yet another pretty piss poor excuse for this guys piss poor performance, motivation, and training....

Oh well, "My Bad", now let's find someone else to "blame"...in our "brave new world", where we hold everyone harmless for any of their personal failures, lest we might hold the "responsible" for their actions, which might damage their unearned self esteem... My best professional opinion is that this hoghead is and was an embarrassment to everyone of you on AP who ran an engine safely in your career.

The issue with the car was a minor contributory factor in the resulting damage, or resultant deaths and injury, not a primary cause, given the crash speeds. And, that it was the part of the waiver on securing of car components that was involved, was not due to an inherent car flaw, but attributable to yet another "institutional" failure to follow up on proper oversight, and compliance testing for proper strength of those components used to comply with the waiver, which has nothing to do with the compression standards issues.

But, apparently by golly, the NTSB is going make you all "safer", by issuing a finding blaming the car maker, in spite of the chain of clear individual human failure, multiple institutional failures, and a lack of oversight, even up to and including the FRA itself, for not doing and/or requiring more inspection, of the compliance on the very waiver modifications, the NTSB cited, as the issue with the cars.