Sad day for metro (crash in D.C.)

[jward]

The story I read in an old railroad mag. said that they ran the red signal and they sent the breakman back with a hammer to break the red lenses .  What ever it was i amde an interesting story.

while that is an interesting story it was demonstrably not true in the crash at jack's run. the entire head end crew were among the dead, and they were the only ones who would have known about the signal. it was the investigators who found the broken red lens laying on the track and who figured it out. the wreck site was probably a mile west of the signal. jacks run was a tower, manned by a telegraph operator, up until the late 1970s when conrail installed tcs on this section. it is still a major junction just outside pittsburgh, now known as cp bell.