This brings up the fact that the lawyers have a side industry now, that being the "expert witness," who convinces the jury that the engineer "could have stopped in time had he tried harder or acted sooner." This is usually accompanied by a lot of fancy charts, videos, computer simulations, etc. The data may be (and usually is) phoney, but the jury won't know that and won't care. They think the guy is an expert, even though he may never have been anywhere near a railroad in his life, or his railroad background had nothing to do with actual train operations.