You may be right. Her storytelling is free of the sort of opaque language that lets people interpret it any way they like... such language is sometimes poetic and inspiring, but would not be a good fit for Rand's novel. Thus it is not a weakness of the novel that she avoided it.

Opaque language, or simply shallow? Not everything lacking depth ought to be commended for the fact.

The reader is intended to focus on the thoughts of the passengers and the consequences of their prior beliefs.

That's because the reader of Atlas Shrugged is intended to either think very small, very simple thoughts, or to be semipsychotic. Indeed, this idea that people with "whimsically held beliefs" should deserve to die unwittingly in a train crash is exactly what Erik Naggum was writing about in this thread! So we've come full circle.

Naggum writes that his interpretation of freedom has to do with an acceptance of risk, which is an interesting way to look at the concept. In Rand's society, as he notes, there is no acceptance of risk. Either you do things exactly how Rand would like you to, or you die in a fiery train crash. Or you die like Eddie Willers, who supports Dagny the entire time but isn't quite special enough to avoid dying with the rest of society, as Dagny instantly forgets about him and goes whimsically on her way.

Look, I know what Rand was intending. I had my phase of thinking she wasn't a deluded psychopath too. My point was that her intent led to her thinking it was perfectly okay to write a scene featuring people dying in a train crash for thinking bad thoughts, and that furthermore it was okay to found an entire "school" of philosophy around the concepts laid out in the same book, which, for all its strict observances of "objective" reality, also has a scene where scientists build a torture device that miraculously doesn't work on John Galt.

A rational philosophical assault on that scene might proceed as follows: How much control did the people on that train have over their beliefs? Is it possible for somebody to believe wholesale in something harmful, without ever having a chance to doubt themselves? Then we can actually look at how people act in real life and realize that, in many cases, our inbred beliefs aren't entirely under our control. So when those people are killed for their whimsical beliefs, perhaps it's not their beliefs that they die for. Perhaps it's the beliefs of their parents, who raised them not to question certain things and so blinded them to the future. These people might be rehabilitated, but no, in Atlas Shrugged they will die without a questioning of their motives.

It's one of those scenes that's suspiciously close to Christianity — these pop up everywhere in Rand's writing. She believes that people are born evil or born good, that their character just pops out of the womb, that there's no chance to change. No character has a change of heart in the entire book. So by her logic it's okay to sentence evil people to die — not just in the train scene, but when Dagny shoots a guard, or when Ragnar destroys ship after ship because not a single talented captain on the planet will argue with him so he's just killing off virtual retards. It's the world ending in fire, with John Galt delivering the good people into salvation — and, let's remember, nobody is as pure as Galt in this story, and all of them would have died were it not for his brilliant idea.

It's not worth further arguing here. Atlas Shrugged is a brittle enough novel that a sharp tap crumbles it. It's certainly not the sort of writing that deserves to be taken seriously.