Fatal US crash train ‘moving too fast’

Federal investigators have determined that an Amtrak train that crashed in Philadelphia, killing at least eight people, was careening through the city at 170km/h before it ran off the rails along a sharp curve where the speed limit drops to just 80km/h, yet they still don’t know why it was going so fast.

Robert Sumwalt, of the National Transportation Safety Board, said a data recorder and a video camera in the train’s front end could yield clues to what happened.

Amtrak inspected the stretch of track on Tuesday, just hours before the accident, and found no defects, according to the Federal Railroad Administration.