2003 Ford Taurus no start

2003 Ford Taurus no start
2003 Ford Taurus OHV Engine
This morning driving to school I was accelerating from the toll plaza, pushed it a little hard, and noticed that the engine sputtered and cut out, but never stalled. Happened again when I was pushing it to merge onto the highway. When I got to school, I put it in park and revved the Engine to about 3000 RPM and held it there. After a 2-3 seconds it began to sputter, and finally stalled out completely. Tried to restart it, but it didn't want to start. cycled power a few times to build fuel pressure, and tried again and it started no problem. After class, on the way home, it just kept getting consistently worse, so that it even stalled several times trying to maintain speed up several longish hills. Bought a fuel filter on the way home and replaced it once I got home. No problems replacing the filter, but when I tried to start it again, it won't start. Disconnected the fuel line from the fuel rail on the engine and cycled power and there is good fuel flow out of the fuel line. reconnected the line and cranked the engine over, and it fired, ran for a second, sputtered, and stalled. cycle power, still won't start again. If I give it a shot of ether it will fire, but it won't run without it. I can hear the pump running and sounds no different than usual.

DTC: P0320 Ignition Engine Speed input circuit performance. I suspect this is just because of the stalling and sudden drops in RPM when it stutters that it is causing readings out of its tolerance, but feel free to tell me otherwise.

I reset the code right before I replaced the filter, and it came back when it started briefly when I pulled the fuel line from the rail.

According to the scan tool's "snapshot" there is 39 PSI @ 1036 RPM in the fuel rail, but I don't have the tool to check it for myself.

Any thoughts are greatly appreciated.

  dvdrose18

Chalk this one up to experience.
Turns out that the engine won't run if the wire falls off the crankshaft position sensor.:banghead: Guess the fault code was for real... The plug must have been knocked loose in the accident, and finally stopped making contact. Question is whether that was the only problem, or if the fuel filter was bad too. Oh well, looked like the original filter, so I guess it was overdue to be replaced anyway with 80,000 miles.

  dvdrose18