A couple of weeks ago, amid a rain-saturated week, thousands of riders on Virginia Railway Express had to catch cabs or find other rides home when VRE canceled some service during the Thursday evening journey. Many people spent hours stuck in commuting limbo and no doubt were furious.

After seeing this picture, which VRE published in a newsletter for passengers this week, they should be grateful to VRE, as well as the rail owners CSX and Norfolk Southern, for avoiding a tragedy:

But VRE passengers also should be outraged that the rail lines didn’t impose speed restrictions earlier Sept. 8 — and that VRE didn’t pressure the rail lines to do so (at least so far as we riders know). The policies in place for determining when to slow trains for safety reasons and when to let them chug full steam are utterly nonsensical and thus both aggravating and dangerous at the same time.

The proof of this was evident a few weeks before the pictured ballast collapse on the Fredericksburg Line. The aggravation reached a pinnacle Aug. 18, when Norfolk Southern imposed speed restrictions of 15 miles per hour during an evening commute that barely got the tracks wet.

It was a knee-jerk decision driven by the same kind of mentality that prompts schools and local governments in the Washington area to close at the mere chance of snow or ice rather than visible precipitation. Our “turtle train” arrived more than an hour late, long after the few sprinkles had fallen. VRE fielded numerous complaints and shared that customer aggravation with Norfolk Southern.

That aggravation, followed days later by a legitimate earthquake-induced nightmare commute for VRE riders, likely led to Norfolk Southern’s dangerous leniency in imposing flood restrictions during heavy rainfalls the week of Sept. 4.

After catching grief from both VRE customers and VRE as a client, the rail company didn’t want to repeat its mistakes of the recent past, so it erred in the opposite direction. This, too, is the reaction of schools and local governments after they are rightly mocked for closing prematurely.

All of us VRE riders are glad that the long-distance vision of a locomotive engineer avoided tragedy Sept. 8, and we truly appreciate the commitment of both VRE and Norfolk Southern to our safety. We just wish they would exercise better judgment about when to impose speed restrictions based on fears of flash floods that could compromise the tracks.

(Editor’s note: I travel the Manassas Line and actually telecommuted the day before and the day of the track collapse covered in this blog post to avoid delays. I was stunned that the rail companies took so long to impose speed restrictions, tweeted my disgust as I watched the real-time updates on VRE’s Twitter account, and was mortified when I saw the picture of the ballast collapse.)