Recently, a Washington to New York Amtrak commuter train derailed and at least six people died and over a hundred were rushed to nearby hospitals. This calamity happened as unbelted passengers were violently thrown about inside these trains like unrestrained flying objects. After this calamity, some folks have questioned why don't trains have seat belts? Would seat belts have saved lives and reduced the documented carnage? This very same danger is repeated over and over again in school bus wrecks. While news of these horrible events garners attention and constantly begs the question of the need for more safety in buses and trains, nothing ever changes. History repeats itself.

• 1987 New York Times: "Seat belts on trains weighed after deadly crash."

"The federal government's chief railroad safety officer said today that he would seek comments on whether seat belts should be installed on the passenger coaches of Amtrak and the five commuter rail systems that use the Northeast Corridor between Washington and Boston. The official, John Riley, administrator of the Federal Railroad Administration, said he was not making a formal proposal for seat belts on passenger trains at this time but wanted to hear what railroad officials had to say in light of the collision of an Amtrak passenger train and three Conrail diesel engines last Sunday. Fifteen people were killed and 178 others were injured in the accident near Baltimore. "It's an obvious issue," Mr. Riley said of the idea of installing seat belts. "When you see an accident like this, there are all kinds of ideas that come up." The Government requires that seat belts be installed on all passenger cars sold in this country and on airplanes.

• April 2002 Liberal News and Commentary:

"Amtrak's Auto Train derailed at 5:08 p.m. on Thursday afternoon when it failed to successfully negotiate a curve. Even though pictures from the crash site show that the train's passenger cars remained virtually intact, four people were killed and 159 injured, many critically, because the passengers were tossed violently within their train cars when the cars flopped about during the derailment. The Florida Times-Union is the leading newspaper in the area of Florida where the derailment occurred. The Times-Union is based in Jacksonville. Yesterday, the Times-Union published a story titled "4 dead, more than a hundred injured in Florida Amtrak derailment." In paragraph eight of that story, a person identified as Bernie Morgan was quoted as saying, "We just started hurtling and left the track and the next thing we knew, we were bouncing off the walls." That's how people get killed or injured. They bounce off the walls, other seats, other people and other things, many of which have very hard surfaces (like the roof and the floor).  Even after the train stops moving, people keep flying about until they crash into something hard enough to stop them from moving. This often results in severely broken bodies, lots of spilled blood, horrific pain and tremendous suffering, all needlessly inflicted because Amtrak is too cheap to install seat belts on their trains and because Congress has, to this point, been too gutless to require Amtrak to install seat belts on their trains. If the passengers had been secured in their seats with seat belts, surely none of them would have been killed and most injuries would have been minor in nature."

• July 31, 2007: The British Rail Safety and Standards Board (a railway industry organization) issued a major study which stated that:

"The results from the testing of the three-point seat belt applications indicated that restraining occupants with this type of belt would be likely to reduce the injury levels compared with injuries sustained by an unrestrained occupant impacting a crashworthy seat, although both were within acceptable limits."