from the New York Times

At a news conference near the crash site, Robert L. Sumwalt, the current N.T.S.B. chairman, ruled out foul play and said investigators initially believed that a switch had been manually thrown and then padlocked. “The key to this investigation is learning why that switch was lined that way because the expectation was, of course, that the Amtrak train would operate like this,” he said, pointing to a whiteboard showing the passenger train’s southbound direction.

Read more: 2018, February 8, Cayce SC Amtrak Derailing

Amtrak has described itself as a “safe and reliable transporter,” but Mark V. Rosenker, a former chairman of the N.T.S.B., said that although Sunday’s accident was another in a “series of anomalies,” it perhaps hinted at a “lack of safety culture” at Amtrak. He suspected that Sunday’s crash involved some discrepancy in the way CSX communicates with Amtrak, which does not own large swaths of the track it uses, and Mr. Hall suggested that the design of the nation’s rail network invited collisions between passenger and freight trains.

Derailments rarely cause more than minor injuries, but the aftermath was tragically different on Sunday, not far from Columbia, the state capital. Gov. Henry McMaster said the engine of the Amtrak train, which had been carrying eight crew members and 139 passengers on its route from New York to Miami, was “barely recognizable.”

“It’s a horrible thing to see — to understand the force that this involved,” Mr. McMaster said.

The Lexington County coroner, Margaret Fisher, identified the dead as Amtrak employees: the train’s 54-year-old engineer, Michael Kempf, of Savannah, Ga., and a conductor, Michael Cella, 36, of Orange Park, Fla. Both men were in the first car of the train. They took dozens of passengers to a nearby middle school, where the American Red Cross set up a temporary shelter and passengers tried to make sense of what had happened aboard Train 91 at about 2:35 a.m. on Sunday.

                                                    What happened?

Looking at the chart and the yod drawn on it, I would say that with Pluto in its essential ruler Scorpio in the Eighth and Saturn in the Seventh focal determinators to the opposition of Uranus in the Eleventh and the Moon in the Fourth (Aries and Libra respectively), that one engineer was hotdogging the rails i.e. going at too fast a speed to slow down for incoming traffic.  I am not sure if it is CSX or Amtrak that was the culprit and I twist and turn the two around, one time coming up with CSX based on the Ascendant and another time coming up with Amtrak based on Saturn in the Seventh.  If you have an alternative reading, drop us a line. Thanks.

the chart for the amtrak derailing

Here’s the update:  Amtrak was the culprit from the New York Post, my hometown paper.