You wonder how stupid a film has to get before you call it a spoof. You could easily have made this film twice as good by employing Leslie Nielsen to open the door to the cockpit and say "Good luck, we're all counting on you".
For me the suspense in these films is made by the realism. Intelligent people doing the sensible things that just don't go right, or the sensibly designed equipment is just not up to the job.
Here we have stupid people doing idiotic things, the laws of physics are completely ignored. Ropes pass through overhead cables. And quite frankly I think I designed a safer locomotive when I was 12. A bird with precise bowel movements could have shorted out this train.
In fact I recommend you watch it backwards, that way you can go from the obvious outcomes to the hilarious and unpredictable reasons that got them into that outcome.