In a rural area all you had to do was bend the rail or cut out a small section of track and it would have derailed. No way would you take the chance of this getting to a city. It's not that hard to derail a train.
shareWhy did it take so long to stop the real runaway train that this was inspired by then?
shareBecause in the real life incident that inspired it there was no danger to a huge population center and yeah they used a derailer that failed but the train that stopped it did it fairly easily.
My point is that if this thing was really going to reach a ton and kill thousand of people they could easily have just ripped out some track before it ever reached the town. No way they would take the chance they did in the movie and put the town and thousands of lives in that much danger.
It is a movie first and foremost so we do have to suspend our disbelief, what would be done in reality doesn't happen in films. Mainly because there wouldn't be a story if the simplest solution was put into place. We can all see how they could easily have stopped the train but wheres the excitement in that.
But anyways when you look at it the reason why they didn't attempt to derail when the train was going through open areas is Gavin declined to derail the train to save money. He knew what was best and that was risking the lifes of two people to stop the train all to save money. When it didn't work they finally while still adding up cost of derailing it they then decided to derail in a smaller town with less possible lives lost. When that failed he had no other plan to stop the train.
"Some of the worst things imaginable have been done with the best intentions"
Actually Connie insisted on derailing the train before it reached the first town, when they still had 15miles to go. But Galvin refused to, as the loss would be heavy. Instead Galvin had Judd Stewart at the front of the runaway train to slow it down. (which didn't work and killed Stewart)
shareYou're correct in your statement. In the crazy eights incident, the same was true. I thought that the use of portable details was nonsensical (they're designed to be effective at only 5 MPH and below) and proved to be such. I think that the reason for not taking more effective action was the hope and desire for stopping the runaway with the least amount of destructive impact. The decision to have another locomotive couple to the rear (I think that coupling to the front would have been just as effective, but might have been more risky) and slow the runaway with dynamic braking proved to do the job without property destruction.
shareI agree stopping the train should've been easy, but for a different reason. When the engineer who died was doing his attempt to stop the train, when his train bumped up with 777 why didn't he just go back and step over to the other engine and enter the cab to stop it? The bit with the dangling guy seemed unnecessary. Especially when we Denzel easily moving car to car at speed at the end, showing it's not even difficult heh.
shareMy main difficultly with the plot is that at the end all that mattered was that some guy drove the car at high speed parallel to the train and that enabled Will to get onto the driver's seat to stop the train, seemingly without much difficulty. In that case, why that had not been tried earlier? All those part about derailing the train, the two characters climbing and jumping from one carriage to another, etc. would have been totally unnecessary.
shareYeah I was thinking this half way through the film ... makes perfect sense really but not much of a movie I suppose.
share