"Sun Kink" in Amtrak crash?

[Bapopik at AOL.COM]

   From www.nytimes.com (although I also heard "sun kink" used in other news reports):

April 20, 2002

Officials Investigate Cause of Fatal Amtrak Crash
By DANA CANEDY

CRESCENT CITY, Fla., April 19 — Federal safety officials said the engineer of a 40-car Amtrak train that derailed near here on Thursday tried to bring the train to an abrupt emergency shop after seeing a "misalignment" in the tracks.

"The locomotive engineer said he was reacting to something," said Russ Quinby, who is leading the investigation for the National Transportation Safety Board.

Within hours of the crash, four other trains had traveled over the same tracks without incident. The last one before the accident was a train carrying coal. Inspectors investigated the wheels of that train to determine if it had hit something on the tracks but found no evidence of that, said George Black, a spokesman for the safety board.

Mr. Black said that if there was an irregularity on the tracks it could have been caused by several factors, including heat or a split in the rail. The safety board and the Federal Bureau of Investigation said the agencies had no reason to believe that the crash was caused by a criminal act but were not yet ruling out the possibility.

The authorities were focusing on the possibility that a "sun kink," a buckle in the tracks caused by heat, might have caused the crash, they said.

(...)