Emelia/Emi on Nostr: If this is the incident I'm thinking of, it was a "hot box" bearing failure from an ...

If this is the incident I'm thinking of, it was a "hot box" bearing failure from an ancient freight car that was made with journal bearings (which are much more prone to hot box events) and was detected multiple times by wayside defect detectors (which is what allows them to safely run with so few crew the vast majority of the time) so it wasn't particularly a "lack of crew vs train size" problem in this instance: as they complied with the safety rules by-the-book, and unscheduled stopping of a train is a *big fucking deal*, more people almost certainly wouldn't have stopped it.

The actual problem was insufficient standards for addressing a hot box event: they had *two detectors in a row* fire off about it, with the temperature skyrocketing between them, but because the temperature was slightly below the magic "threshold," they kept going until they hit the third detector, which then told them that the bearing was pretty much a liquid. It failed while they were in the process of stopping the train.