I attend college at Drexel in Philadelphia, so on a few occasions I have taken the train home (both Amtrak and SEPTA). Having never taken trains before that, I was absolutely shocked at the complete lack of security on our railways.
Not once was my bag ever checked and they don’t even check for a ticket until long after the train has left the station! It frightens me that anyone could just walk onto a commuter train with enough explosive in a duffle bag to level half a city block without anyone knowing.
The fact that I go back to school this coming weekend and then start my internship at Siemens just has me even more worried. I’ll be working in Malvern which means I will be on the train twice a day. I would have thought that after what happened in Spain some attempt would be made to secure our rail system.
Shouldn’t something be done? Terrorists are more likely to go after an unchecked system than to try and get through airport security again, which is now a place where they are being watched for.
If this country were to take terrorism agains communter rail and AMTRAk seriously, it would also have to address commuter buses, regional and interstate bus lines, etc. The country will not unless and until terrorism strikes those very targets.
However, if terrorists see America through big ticket and big city eyes, a commuter transportation attack outside of the major cities appears unlikely.
Even if we set up security checkpoints at train stations, how could we stop terrorists from planting bombs on the tracks? We would have to build barbed-wire security fences along both sides of every mile of track in the U.S., with security cameras.
The only good side is that trains can’t be hijacked – that is, a terrorist could seize control of the engine but couldn’t divert the train from its course; and if it were the kind of train that runs on electric power from a third rail or an overhead wire, it would be easy to shut off the power and the train would come to a gradual stop.
Quite simply, it’s impossible to instigate airline-type security on railways. IIRC, the London Underground carries two million people every day. A far bigger consideration is crowd control (and that’s not facetious, there’s stations that are regularly closed because they’d get dangerous otherwise).
A very simplistic parallel…Brits will remember the chaos after the Hatfield rail crash…for those who don’t know, it was a horific high-speed crash that was complely due to shoddy maintainance work. IIRC four people died - but in the chaos on the rail network that followed, the increase of people using cars instead estimated to cause ten times that number dead on the roads.
It’d be no problem on many networks to plough a train into a dead-end at full speed. And remember that a full commuter train has as many people on board as three 747s. All they need to do is choose a diesel train.
In England, maybe. In the U.S., I’ve never boarded a train (except for a big-city subway train at rush hour) that didn’t have a lot of empty seats. Most people, most of the time, get around by car.
Oh, yeah, there’s plenty of empty trains here, too. But no terrorist (other than one with a penchant for the absurd) would bomb an empty aluminium box. But there are substantial commuter networks in various parts of the US, which could easily be targeted. As they were in Madrid, or as they were in Japan. Unfortunately, there’s nothing you can do about it - America just has to learn to live with that small low-level uncertainty that many of us have grown up with.
I would think that the most potential danger would not be ‘bombing an empty box’ but rather smuggling a nasty bomb or biological or chemical weapon or something equally unsavory onboard a train in some relatively obscure town and then riding it into New York or D.C. or someplace else and then detonating it as the train arrives at the station. Transporting such things by car would seem to be preferred, though the idea of sabotaging AMTRAK or subways might be more effective in hindering day-to-day life for Americans who rely on trains.
And effectively unstoppable. :eek: That’s one of the disadvantages of having such a mobile society: Once the terrorists get their bomb or whatever into the country, they can find a way to transport it and detonate it anywhere. Well, not, say, inside the Pentagon or the White House – but near them.
The only way to stop it is to intercept them at the border. And even then, there’s lots of things they can acquire inside the U.S. – legally – which they can use to make bombs.
I would think the idea of sabotaging roads (especially bridges and tunnels) would be even more effective. More Americans would feel personally threatened by an attack on the highway system than the rail system, which is the whole point of terrorism. And driving an explosive-filled truck into a tunnel is probably easier than loading explosive onto a train.
