Talk:June 2009 Washington Metro train collision

This is the talk page for discussing improvements to the June 2009 Washington Metro train collision article.
This is not a forum for general discussion of the article's subject.

Put new text under old text. Click here to start a new topic.
New to Wikipedia? Welcome! Learn to edit; get help.

Article policies

Find sources: Google (books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL

This article has not yet been rated on Wikipedia's content assessment scale.
It is of interest to the following WikiProjects:

Please add the quality rating to the {{WikiProject banner shell}} template instead of this project banner. See WP:PIQA for details.

United States: District of Columbia / Washington Metro Mid‑importance

	United States portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject United States, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of topics relating to the United States of America on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the ongoing discussions. Template Usage Articles Requested! Become a Member Project Talk Alerts United StatesWikipedia:WikiProject United StatesTemplate:WikiProject United StatesUnited States
Mid	This article has been rated as Mid-importance on the project's importance scale.
	Washington, D.C. portal This article is supported by WikiProject District of Columbia (assessed as Mid-importance).
	This article is supported by WikiProject District of Columbia - Washington Metro (assessed as Top-importance).

Please add the quality rating to the {{WikiProject banner shell}} template instead of this project banner. See WP:PIQA for details.

Trains: Rapid transit Mid‑importance

	Trains Portal
Sel	week 38, 2009

This article is within the scope of WikiProject Trains, an attempt to build a comprehensive and detailed guide to rail transport on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, you can visit the project page, where you can join the project and/or contribute to the discussion. See also: WikiProject Trains to do list and the Trains Portal.TrainsWikipedia:WikiProject TrainsTemplate:WikiProject Trainsrail transport

Mid

This article has been rated as Mid-importance on the project's importance scale.

Associated projects or task forces:
/
	This article is supported by WikiProject Rapid transit.

It is requested that an a map be included in this article to improve its quality. Please work with the Maps task force to create and add a map to this article.

An editor has requested that an image or photograph of Add a photo of the accident wreckage be added to this article.

June 2009 Washington Metro train collision has been listed as one of the Engineering and technology good articles under the good article criteria. If you can improve it further, please do so. If it no longer meets these criteria, you can reassess it.

Article milestones
Date	Process	Result
June 22, 2009	Articles for deletion	Kept
September 9, 2009	Good article nominee	Listed

A news item involving this article was featured on Wikipedia's Main Page in the "In the news" column on June 22, 2009.

Current status: Good article

This article has been mentioned by a media organization:

Rob Pegoraro (2009-06-23). "The Bad News Network: Twitter, Facebook and Liveblogs". The Washington Post.

A fact from this article was featured on Wikipedia's Main Page in the On this day section on June 22, 2011 and June 22, 2014.

Archives

Archive 1

GA Review

This review is transcluded from Talk:2009 Washington Metro train collision/GA1. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.

Comments:

Citations are not supposed to be in the lead as it is a summary of the article.
The sentence "A moving train collided with a train stopped ahead of it, causing its lead car to telescope, and causing the deaths of the train operator and eight passengers, making it the deadliest crash in the history of the Washington Metro." sounds wordy.
How come there is an inconsistency between how the time is presented (12 hour vs. 24 hour) in the first sentence of the Collision section and the timeline. Also, the first sentence says 5:03 PM while the timeline says 5:02 PM. Which is it?
Citation needed for "The 1000 series entered service in 1976 when the Metro system opened, and were refurbished and had their motors converted from DC to AC propulsion by Breda Costruzioni Ferroviarie in the mid-1990s."
Citation also needed for "While the 1000-series cars are fitted with anticlimber devices to prevent deadly telescoping, it is not known why these devices have failed in their intended function."
There are some short paragraphs in the Initial inquiry section. Can these be combined to form longer paragraphs?
Citation needed for "WMATA is disabling each circuit that cannot be immediately fixed and has created an online circuit tracking system, similar to its elevator outage tracker."
Citation also needed for "The cars are automatically driven by on-board systems called Automatic Train Operation and Automatic Train Control, which communicate with a central computer system in Washington."

I am placing the article on hold. Dough4872 (talk) 17:14, 6 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I have fixed problem 2 above by removing the reference to telescoping, which is covered in the first paragraph ("Collision") of the rest of the article. --Tkynerd (talk) 17:50, 6 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Item 3 above has been corrected by using the time in the cited reference and making all times in 12-hour format Truthanado (talk) 23:47, 6 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]
I believe I have corrected the remaining issues noted. I combined some of the paragraphs in the inquiry section and integrated the timeline section into the prose description of the collision. Thank you. The V-Man ^{(Said · Done)} 06:49, 9 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I will now pass the article. Dough4872 (talk) 14:37, 9 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Archiving

If there are no objections, I am going to archive all talk on this page older than 30 days. The V-Man ^{(Said · Done)} 06:58, 9 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Faulty source

Footnote 12 (Welovedc.com) is a blog, and thus violates WP:SPS. We should try to replace it with something that meets WP:RS. - Biruitorul ^Talk 04:35, 10 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

In all cases, it's used as a secondary source. I have removed it. The V-Man ^{(Said · Done)} 13:11, 10 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Great! Thank you. - Biruitorul ^Talk 20:47, 10 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

FAC withdrawn

This article was brought to FAC prematurely; I have removed it. To any potential nominators: Please make sure to consult the article's main editors before performing any such nomination, in addition to carefully reviewing the Featured Article criteria at WP:WIAFA. --Andy Walsh (talk) 02:21, 5 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

NTSB released a lot of documents that we should mine for this article

Here it is:

http://www.ntsb.gov/Dockets/RailRoad/DCA09MR007/default.htm

This is like a treasure trove of information right here, and a lot of this might be useful... SchuminWeb (Talk) 13:21, 17 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Cause

It says under investigation but History Channel just said it was the bad relays that made the stopped train invisible. Daniel Christensen (talk) 00:34, 6 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

More specifically Engineering Disasters on Modern Marvels. Daniel Christensen (talk) 00:50, 6 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Updates

This event took place 5 years ago, but most of the information from the final NTSB report has not yet been incorporated into the article. I'll give a go at cleaning it up. Does it make sense to reduce the size of the initial investigation section after the final report has been issued? Not sure how much relevance there is to hypotheses in the immediate aftermath. 216.164.56.98 (talk)