joining us now, two former national transportation safety board members kitty higgins and john golhi. thank you both for being here. >> thank you. >> kitty, what stood out to you from the ntsb press conference? >> well, what stood out to me rev, when member zumwalt said the emergency brake was applied by the engineer which meant that the engineer was in fact in control of the train, and he used the emergency brake as opposed to what i could consider the normal braking system. so the question for me is what was he doing in those minutes before he realized he had to apply the emergency brake. was he distracted in some way. >> how are they going to find out what he was doing? >> well they will interview him. they will also look at his cell phone. would he by in some way have been using his cell phone? was he texting? we've seen other accidents where that's been a major factor. those are my questions. what was he doing? why didn't he apply the brake sooner? was he familiar with the route? >> john let me ask you, let me go to you, john goalier, what are the main things that the engineer co

joining me now is former ntsb board member kitty higgins. kitty, we're hearing that the section of the track had a 50-mile-per-hour speed limit. that the train was, from initial reports, going at over 100 miles per hour. how accurately can we monitor train speeds on any given day? >> well alex, what is interesting is that this train and the asella also an amtrak train, have to follow the same rules. the asella train has something called positive train control, or automatic train stop. so that speed is monitored, and if the engineer for whatever reason, is exceeding the speed, the train will automatically stop. you've got an amtrak train in this accident that apparently did not have that feature. so it is possible through technology to monitor speed. we will know more once we get the read out of the black box. but from my perspective, that technology ought to be on every train in the northeast corridor. >> so this was a regional train. that technology to monitor speed was not on the regional train. in terms of when you hear that the train was