Galt's Gulch

Amtrak derailment in Philadelphia

Posted by $ jbrenner 8 years, 11 months ago to News
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Did John Galt sabotage the tracks, or did government ineptitude lead to this disaster (or both)? I used to ride this train back from college during my undergrad days at The University of Delaware. FoxNews is talking about "a curve". The curve is extremely long and not at all sharp. I always thought that train ride was ridiculously slow.

I guess the guvmint didn't buy and install Rearden Metal.
SOURCE URL: http://www.nbcphiladelphia.com/news/local/Amtrak-Derailment-Philadelphia--303536331.html

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  • Posted by Temlakos 8 years, 11 months ago
    I did think of the Taggart Tunnel Disaster. John Galt, remember, did not commit direct sabotage. He felt no need. It was enough to identify anyone with talent on the line and induce him to quit.

    How many people have quit, so that we have this wreck? Of course, we don't know--yet--the immediate cause of the wreck.
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    • Posted by $ jbrenner 8 years, 11 months ago
      Actually we don't know whether John Galt committed direct sabotage or not. The book didn't say. It will take a lot to convince me that Galt didn't cause the interlocker debacle that prompted switching via lanterns.
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      • Posted by Temlakos 8 years, 11 months ago
        "On October 15, a copper wire broke." And before then, other copper wires had just broken. Three of them, to be exact.
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        • Posted by $ jbrenner 8 years, 11 months ago
          We don't know whether or not Galt committed sabotage. We do know that Ragnar was a pirate to hasten the end of the looters' era. We also know that D'Anconia exploded his own mines. Whether Galt did any sabotage is left to the imagination of the reader. AR was quite clever with regard to this.

          I must admit that I have always read AS from Dagny's perspective, perhaps because I have long struggled with what I will call "Dagny savior complex". This may have biased me somewhat with regard to viewing Galt more as a destroyer, rather than a creator.
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          • Posted by Temlakos 8 years, 11 months ago
            Fair enough. I tended to read AS from Henry Rearden's perspective. He is the other hero in this peace. (John Galt, Francisco d'Anconia, and Ragnar Danneskjöld were anti-villains, not heroes. Heroes must change their outlook in the course of a narrative. Villains and anti-villains need not. I call them anti-villains because their cause is just, rather than unjust.)

            Well, Henry Rearden simply is primarily trying to protect what's his, and secondarily to fulfill what he always thought was his role in society. He did suffer, and greatly, when Ragnar sank a load of copper bound for his mills. And he didn't appreciate Francisco coming between him and Dagny. Nevertheless, he finally turned his back on a society that could select leaders like James Taggart, Floyd Ferris, Tinky Holloway, and the two other men who met him at the Wayne-Falkland that fateful night. He concluded he was no longer in a society of rational men. He had made that decision even before he came back to a riot, witnessed the death of Tony Wet-nurse, and then got clobbered.
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            • Posted by $ jbrenner 8 years, 11 months ago
              As a materials scientist, it was also easy for me to identify with Hank Rearden. And to top it off, I had a few years in my life like Tony the Wet Nurse, too, before reading AS.
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              • Posted by Temlakos 8 years, 11 months ago
                Tell me this: can you suggest a workable model for Rearden Metal? I suspected it might be a combined substitutional/interstitial alloy, with carbon blended into the interstices of a crystal lattice alternating between iron and copper. It therefore becomes difficult to tell whether to call Rearden Metal a "steel" or a "bronze."
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                • Posted by $ jbrenner 8 years, 11 months ago
                  Your description of Rearden Metal was how I envisioned it as well. Interstitial compounds used to be my area of specialty 20 years ago. Now I just teach about them.

                  You are quite correct. By your definition, Rearden Metal would be both a steel and a bronze. Bronzes sometimes also have interstitial hydrogen. I would expect Rearden Metal to have both interstitial carbon and hydrogen, likely being carbonized from a methane source.

                  Stainless steels, however, have very little carbon, and have Mo and Cr added to provide a sacrificial oxide (with pardon to those who disagree with sacrifice. In this case, it means that the Mo and Cr oxidize to protect the Fe underneath.) and Ni to stabilize the austenitic form of Fe.

                  A little Sn would likely help as well and could definitely give Rearden Metal the glimmering blue described in AS.

                  Even today finding the eutectic on such a multicomponent phase diagram would be PhD worthy. Developing the accompanying time-temperature-transformation diagram would still likely be a ten year endeavor as it was for Rearden.
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                  • Posted by Temlakos 8 years, 11 months ago
                    I had just enough physical chemistry as a freshman at Yale College (with advance placement in chemistry) to understand what you were getting at. The thing I couldn't understand was: how could the eutectic tolerate temperatures higher than ordinary steel? You're the specialist. Would you still say such a thing was possible, and Cu would be a good contributor, and keep the cost down?
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                    • Posted by $ jbrenner 8 years, 11 months ago
                      Eutectics are the minimal temperatures for liquid-solid phase transitions on a temperature vs. composition plot. For example, the reason that electrical solder (Pb-Sn) is sold as 60 wt. % Sn is because that composition gives the minimal temperature required to melt the resulting alloy. Cu would keep the cost down. The difference in cost between carbon steel and stainless steel is a factor of five, so cost is not a small consideration.
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  • Posted by $ MichaelAarethun 8 years, 11 months ago
    If we can't take care of nor operate the trains system we have now why talk about high speed rail. Train from Jacksonville Florida to Charleston South Carolina was the same four hours as driving and two to four hours faster than flying.
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  • Posted by sfdi1947 8 years, 11 months ago
    T. Roosevelt began the debacle, Wilson continued it, but his nationalization did buy new equipment and the US Railroad Administration consolidation plan was genius till FDR scrapped it prior to its enactment. Then he started the Airline and motor truck infrastructure subsidies, destroying the free market in transportation. Truman came in and his labor policies combined with his refusal to pay back the War Bonds placed the lid on the casket and Eisenhower hammered home the lid by creating the Interstate System. After that , take-over was a sure thing, it was just a matter of time.
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  • Posted by basalyga1 8 years, 11 months ago
    So much we will probably never know. But thanks to our Representative in Congress we do know it was not terrorism. Thank God. I thought those derailers that were stolen might have found their way into some terrorist hand or that those FBI warnings about derailing being another way to terrorize the US. we're accurate. But less than 24 hours after the "accident" be assured ,"it was not terrorism
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  • Posted by mspalding 8 years, 11 months ago
    Inept conductor let the train get to 106 mph going into a curve rated for 53 mph. At the last minute he threw the emergency brakes and derailed the train. If this was a private train, they may not have had a driver or at least they would have had a GPS based speed override.
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    • Posted by $ jbrenner 8 years, 11 months ago
      I just heard that as well. I was just getting ready to post it. Wow! In that stretch of track, 106 mph is suicidal. It must have been like when I tried to push the speed of my model train set as a kid.
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      • Posted by $ nickursis 8 years, 11 months ago
        I thought Megyn Kelly's argument with all the people wanting to immediately blame it on politics, funding and "infrastructure" was telling. She seemed frazzled with the idea that it just couldn't be the case the engineer was in a hurray to get home, or oops...was texting..the demand to instantly determine the cause and find a way to manipulate it was very apparent. I was glad someone called Bullsh@t.
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  • Posted by Herb7734 8 years, 11 months ago
    The government demanded money for infrastructure. They got it. Every penny. No scrimping. $800 billion plus another $200 and some billion. A trillion dollars. Now, with this calamity, there is no doubt they will ask for more. But, before a single cent is allocated, congress must demand to see what was done with the trillion already allocated. What they will find is that most of it was given to the Teacher's Union and various other unions. If more money is allocated that's where it will continue to go so that it can be spent on re-electing the faux royalty of Washington. Taxing for infrastructure can be likened to sweeping shit under the carpet. You can't see it, but it really stinks.
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  • Posted by khalling 8 years, 11 months ago
    This article was the most ridiculous account of a tragic event. Seriously. There are no good journos left. It would be an interesting post - when would John Galt sabotage train tracks?
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    • Posted by $ jbrenner 8 years, 11 months ago
      John Galt would not sabotage the train tracks, but he might cut a copper wire or two. I have always thought that he was responsible for the interlocker failure on p. 949 of AS, after which switching was done manually with lanterns. ;)
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      • Posted by khalling 8 years, 11 months ago
        that was my first thought. but what about war? He controlled how the lights would go oput in AS, and I'd always like to think it would go that way-but it will not. It will be messy, ugly, and very hard. I used to say to my children in the morning to wake them up-"uppy, uppy, little puppy" it annoyed them to no end, how do we annoy to no end 200 million people?
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        • Posted by $ jbrenner 8 years, 11 months ago
          You bring up a good point about war. It will be messy and ugly. Robbie suggested about a year ago that today's technology would make it impossible for the producers to triumph over the looters and moochers today. Not only is information more readily available and hiding that much more difficult, but the number of people in the bureaucracy is so many that it would be like to trying to slay a hydra.
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          • Posted by coaldigger 8 years, 11 months ago
            I have been harboring a different thought which gives me some hope. When the right event causes a significant amount of unrest, the US military will be unwilling to shoot. By electing to have an all volunteer army and offering college money as a reward for service, we have formed the brightest, most competent military force in the world and they will not follow orders blindly. When the producers are ready to shrug, their path might not be nearly as messy as feared.
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      • Posted by gtebbe 8 years, 11 months ago
        As I recall, the knucklehead looters sabotaged themselves with their ineptitude, it wasn't Galt.
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        • Posted by $ jbrenner 8 years, 11 months ago
          The knucklehead looters sabotaging themselves was certainly true for the most part. Ms. Rand was clever enough to let us speculate just how much of the "destroyer" myth was true and how much was myth. She always put such failures into the third person, such as "A copper wire broke." She didn't say whether the failure was due to corrosion or was intentional. If Galt had waited for enough of the world to fail without helping it along like Ragnar did, he quite well would have died of old age before seeing the collapse of the looters' empire.
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    • Posted by $ jbrenner 8 years, 11 months ago
      One of the more interesting questions is how easy or difficult it would be to discriminate sabotage from failures due to excessive use without maintenance. In my field, this is called "root cause analysis". Accident investigations with full CSI coverage would be on the news for weeks now.
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