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I read a quote that electronically controlled brakes could have prevented this, but haven’t heard a good explanation of why (based on the initial NTSB reporting

I read a quote that electronically controlled brakes could have prevented this, but haven’t heard a good explanation of why (based on the initial NTSB reporting that the cause was a failed wheel bearing) - I looked up the ex-government person who the quote was attributed to and they now seem to work in private industry selling electronic control systems for trains. Not to definitively say the safety equipment mentioned that was lobbied against would not have prevented this disaster, but do you know more about it?

mikeyouse 4y ago
So the traditional brakes use a stream of air to actuate the brakes down the line, the 'signal' in these brakes travels at roughly 1,000ft/second. The train in Ohio was 151 cars long and over 9,000 feet long, so from the moment the conductor tries to emergency brake, it would take over 9 seconds for the cars at the tail of the train to even begin braking vs. electronically controlled ones which brake instantaneously. The ECP wikipedia gets into a lot of the details, but by evenly braking instead of the first cars braking and getting "pushed" by the back ones, you limit the risk of derailment by some amount. The counterfactual of "what would have happened" with them is hard to answer with any certainty, but much less kinetic energy in the system and more even braking could have only helped.