Oh, now they think it's a good idea

The New York Times has the day-late-dollar-short story:

Federal investigators said Sunday that a collision warning system they have long called for could have prevented the head-on crash here last week between a commuter train and a freight train that killed 25 people.
The system, known as positive train control and in use sporadically in parts of the country, “would have prevented this accident,” said Kitty Higgins, a member of the National Transportation Safety Board, which is investigating the accident. The board has long pressed for such a system on all trains, but the industry has resisted on the grounds that it is expensive and in some cases not reliable.
A collision avoidance system would have slowed the trains, perhaps stopping them in time before they met in the deadliest train accident in the country in fifteen years. More than 130 people were injured, and workers on Sunday were still clearing the wreckage. The commuter train, headed from Union Station here north to the suburbs, collided head-on with a Union Pacific freight train during rush hour Friday in Chatsworth, a residential area of the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles. The crash nearly obliterated the front car of the commuter train and trapped the living and the dead for hours.
As television trucks set up camp, nobody answered the door at Mr. Sanchez’s home, a one-story, bungalow-style home in La Crescenta, a middle-class suburb north of Los Angeles. Neighbors described the engineer as reclusive.

Rico says he wonders how expensive it's going to be when this little piece of evidence comes up in the wrongful-death suit... (And neighbors should have described the engineer as dead.)