Reply #19: The responses of those pooh-poohing this attack concept are puzzling. Let me address some of the

[stevenleser]

comments.

#1 - Derailing a train going over a bridge is not going to "kill maybe 50 people". Trains can fit an average of around 80 people in one car and these trains have between 5-12 cars. Send an entire train over a bridge and you probably kill around 500 people.

#2 - The psychological and economic impact will be much greater. How do you secure all the rail in the country? Even just securing all the rail bridges in the country would be a very expensive and manpower intensive task. How would that impact people's willingness to travel by rail? Amtrak, which never seems to be doing particularly well financially, might be bankrupted by the afteraffects of such an attack. If Amtrak stops operating, the air routes in heavily traveled corredors and the highways would become more congested.

#3 - Of course, we would then have to respond militarily to such an attack, i.e. more wasted money.

#4 - Then there is what comes next. So once we have spent money responding, and securing the railways as we have the airports, what if Al Qaeda then attacks a shopping mall or another among difficult to secure sets of targets? And it is entirely reasonable to assume that their attack selection would proceed along those lines.

#5 - Would the markets take a nose dive after another attack? Probably. Would new job creation,weak as it is already, suffer? Absolutely.

This doesnt sound like a small thing to me.