Yeah, you can still find me around here once in a blue moon...
Hmm, very sad.
I feel sad for the employee's family. I wonder what the details of this incident are. The park isn't open at 2 a.m., so I wonder if they were doing test rides or safety inspections or something like that.
The parks are usually open late on July 4. The monorails will run up to 2 hours after the last park closes. So last night's run would have been the last lap or so of the night before shifting the trains around to where they wanted them for opening the next day. Reports say there were six guests in the first car of the train (but not in the cab) - none of those guests were hurt.
I've been chatting with a ton of my former monorail colleagues, and it's a tough one to figure out. There are so many safety systems designed to prevent such an accident. I keep reading people saying "must have been overtired" - and I can tell you that while the driver might have been tired, that wouldn't cause the accident.
There is a safety system in place that prevents the monorails from getting too close to each other. There are checkpoints all over the beam, and the system prevents you from getting closer than two checkpoints to another train (unless the driver holds down a manual override button). Also, there is a dead man throttle that has to be twisted to activate and move the train. If a driver falls asleep, either the dead man will kick in, or the sensors will stop the train when it passes the checkpoint where it should stop.
Even without those, the location of the crash adds a few more possible ways to prevent this. It was well lit, so the other monorail was clearly visible, Monorail Central (the system "command center" and person talking to all the trains, and coordinating the system) was in the station right where the train crash happened. Central should have been able to see the second train coming and killed power, stopping the monorail dead. There are more reasons that make this scenario seem incredibly unlikely, but it did happen.
There are at least two tests of the computer sensor system every day, drivers are always talking to Central, each other, etc. The way things are set up, either somebody has to intentionally do something wrong, or a whole bunch of things have to go wrong at the same time.
Very said about the young kid that died. Even though I didn't know him, most of us former Railees still consider current and former drivers a part of the family. Everybody is really sad and trying to figure out how the impossible happened.
