There were more factors to this derailment than the ones you mention. In recent years train companies have forced longer trains than ever to be driven by a single worker, the sort of thing that would make it hard to notice a train car is on fire. They've also forced train car inspections, the sort of thing that might catch a faulty bearing, to be done faster than ever, in the push for endlessly increasing profits.

The workers were raising these and other complaints last year, and our national leaders told them to take a hike, preventing them from striking.

I am amused by how much remixing of facts is happening. On Reddit, I learned that the railroad was negligent for not replacing the rails since the Civil War.

A single axle in a train of several hundred, over continuously changing slope, rail and weather conditions? It most certainly won't be detected until it derails.

Working on the railroads is one of those professions in the US traditionally done by slaves or near-slaves. Just like agricultural work, food service, cleaning, and household help.

i'm responding to op's callous and partisan take.

also the comment originally read "What does it have to do with the crash", which was immediately edited to "How do you know Biden forcing them back to work has anything to do with the crash?"

i will respond to the last one i saw: i don't. i'm pointing out that the wikipedia article about the 2022 union strike makes an argument that the strike was explicitly about safety. here's a vice article that goes into awful and terrifying details <https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkp9m8/what-choice-do-i-have...>. biden's forced solution did not address the original safety concerns beyond "1 day of sick leave".

(edit: 2 minutes after posting this i got downvoted. the level of political discourse…)

> How do you know the crash was the result of missing regulations?

"“Would ECP brakes have reduced the severity of this accident? Yes,” Steven Ditmeyer, a former senior official at the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA), told The Lever."

https://www.levernews.com/rail-companies-blocked-safety-rule...

Unfortunately this issue has multiple factors that contributed, and weakening the legislation and regulations that were put in place to avoid issues like this by the Obama administration:

"The sequence of events began a decade ago in the wake of a major uptick in derailments of trains carrying crude oil and hazardous chemicals, including a New Jersey train crash that leaked the same toxic chemical as in Ohio.

In response, the Obama administration in 2014 proposed improving safety regulations for trains carrying petroleum and other hazardous materials. However, after industry pressure, the final measure ended up narrowly focused on the transport of crude oil and exempting trains carrying many other combustible materials, including the chemical involved in this weekend’s disaster." [0]

Subsequently by the Trump Administration:

"The AAR lobbying group concurred that “the costs of the ECP rule substantially outweigh its benefits,” and claimed the mandate would cost them about $3 billion — or roughly 2 weeks of their operating revenue in a typical year. The FRA estimated the brake requirement would cost about half a billion.

Trump’s Transportation Department ultimately rescinded the brake rule in late 2017." [0]

According to federal investigators, there was a mechanical issue with a car's axle, which basically ends with a derailment. The ECP brakes may have lessened hazard by braking all the cars immediately, classifying the train as HHFT may have meant the train would be going slower than it was, I couldn't find any data about the speed the train was moving at.

This seems to be an area of bipartisan consensus, putting the interests of big business above those of the people.

[0] - https://www.levernews.com/rail-companies-blocked-safety-rule...

Democrats are against government regulation, they worship B. Clinton and he deregulated everything.

Both US parties, as usual, support regulation that damages the other party's prospects or damages the competitors of their own donors.

not sure what you interpreted to write that, its a reflection of the same reality either way

people in the areas where people would need to be swayed, are not.

It would take a lot more calls to random.randint(0, 1) than that for me to think something was wrong. Especially since we're actually talking about values that rarely go outside 0.4 and 0.6.