Comments

1
see mudede. you really are drawn to stories of extremely shitty things happening to women.
2
Good Evening Charles,
Tragic to be sure. But, one does wonder why in the world they were sitting on railway tracks after midnight? Unfortunate, true but arguably foolish as well.
3
As more and more of us spend more and more time online and on social networking sites, more tragedies will involve people who were recently online documenting what they were doing.

Get used to it.
4
Without knowing the bridge in question, it is hard to know how far away they were from the train. If the edge of the bridge was a few feet from the track, they were probably in more danger of falling off the bridge than having a train-related accident.
5
When I moved to Maryland from Seattle last year, my temporary digs were about 15 minutes from Ellicott City. If the train had just passed by normally the wouldn't have been in any danger. This is just tragic.
6

What I read was that there was a break in the cable connecting the cars together to the controls in the engine. At that point the cars start applying their brakes independently which caused them to then derail as the train was still pulling.

#2

They were small town girls home from college where they were doing well. Just hanging and having some beers no doubt reliving high school days....

#4

It was more of an overpass through the center of town. The train was going 25 mph. The jump was about that of one story building.
7
There are a lot levels. I could see Suzanne Vega piecing this together for a nice song.
8
Where to begin: Don't play around trains.
Where to end: Don't play around trains,
9
I used to drink beer by the railroad tracks when I was 19, just like millions of other teens across America, over the last 150+ years. Luckily the vast majority of us were not crushed by a derailing load of coal. This is a terrible tradegy, and implying that the girls were somehow to blame is just stupid.
10
Something bad happened to these people, so they must have deserved it. G'night!
11
People blaming the victims:

A 10-second search on Google Maps would demonstrate that they were sitting about 40 feet from a museum located in a former railway station, which is actually closer to the tracks than they were.

Meaning that if this derailment had happened at noon rather than at midnight, a whole bunch of people who were not breaking the rules (in the way you malign these girls for doing) could have easily been killed.

This was terrible luck, not something they in any way brought upon themselves.
12
This makes me very sad. I want these young women to still be alive.

The "levitating" picture is such a clever idea.
13
Heard they were drinking. Sad.
14
I have spent many a night in old Ellicott City, and I can tell you that what these girls were doing is no more dangerous than standing on a subway platform waiting for a train.

Just so happened that this train derailed. Simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, and like #11 says, had it happened earlier in the day, many more people would have been in that wrong place.

They were not "playing around trains" anymore than people waiting for a bus are "playing around busses."
15
How do we know it was a legitimate derailing?
16
@14, well put. there is nothing in this but a great amount on unluck.
18
Good Morning Charles,
Indeed bad luck. Appears they were drinking as well but @9 has a point. BTW, as a weird corollary, I read on page 2 of the Seattle Times that Gitmo Internet was cut as a result of a train derailment in Maryland. It's forcing a delay in the pretrial hearings in the 9/11 terror case. I believe it was the same accident.

Speaking of stunning tragedies, it is hard to top this one:

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/na…

Bloody horrifying.
19
Similar thing happened in Northbrook, Illinois, several weeks ago. Train derailed, causing the bridge to collapse, dumping coal everywhere. They thought there were no casualties at first, but then they dug out a car that had been crushed by the coal with two bodies inside.
Link: http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2012-…
20
Who the hell cares if they were drinking!
21
There are people who never hung out and drank on train tracks?

That's like never drinking at the end of the runway of the local airport.
22
Isn't there a current proposal to build a terminal to ship coal out of Seattle? It's sad happenstance in this case, but a risk they fail to mention in their commercial about all those jobs (certainly less than 100 permanent ones) would be derailments and and spills in and around Seattle. I'm more concerned about dust, but I really feel like those commercials are misrepresenting the proposal.

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