Transportation: A Head-On Amtrak Crash

It happens dozens of times a day: trains traveling in opposite directions over the same short stretch of track, carefully diverted from disaster by red and green signals. Last week one such routine maneuver went tragically awry. Amtrak's New England Zip, heading from Washington, D.C., to Boston, rammed head-on into another Amtrak train, the Shoreliner, en route from Boston to New York City, on a trestle 80 ft. above a shopping district in Queens, N.Y. The crash left Spanish Diplomat Enrique Gilarranz dead and 125 other passengers injured. When an Amtrak train hit a pickup truck at a grade...

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