Railway Safety Through The Years...

[mitch456yui]

Hi,
I read about three crashes that happened on the Settle & Carlisle, one in 1910, another in 1913 and another in 1995. And one from the WCML, early this year.

1910: Hawes Junction accident,
It occured on the 24th December. A signalman forgot about two light engines that were waiting at the down signal on their way to their base in Carlisle. They were still waiting when the signalman set the points for the down Scotch Express. The signal cleared for the light engines, they set off at a low speed, the express was traveling at a high speed. The trains met just after Moorcock Tunnel near the summit of Ais Gill.
12 deaths and 17 injuries. Made worse by the gas lights in the timber carriages, lit by the hot coal from the pancaked locos.

1913: Ais Gill accident,
Early hours of 2nd September. The first train left Carlisle at 1:38am and when I reached the 1% grade of Ais Gill, it struggled due to LMS' small loco policy and bad coal. Soon the first train, which had 2 engines and requested a pilot, but never got one, ran out of steam, half a mile from the summit. The driver told the guard not to bother protecting the rear of the train, as they would be only standing for a few minutes.
The second train was struggling too, but it had a lighter load. Near Mallerstang, a signal box a quater of the way up Ais Gill, the driver jumped out of his slow moving train and oiled the joints. Meanwhile, his fireman had trouble with an injector. So the driver jumped back in, powered up the train, and helped with the injector. Neither man noticed the signalman at Mallerstang, waving a red lantern. Nor did they see the guard of the first train, waving his lantern. They finally looked up, to see the back end of a passenger train, a few yards away.
16 deaths and 38 serious injuries

1995: Ais Gill accident,
A Super-Sprinter was headcode 2H88, performing the Carlisle-Leeds-via Settle passenger service. But I could only go as far as Ribblehead, 12 miles north of Settle, due to floods. The driver arrived in Ribblehead, swaped ends, and started heading back to Carlisle. On it's way up Ais Gill, pitch back, pouring rain, it ran into a landslide. Derailing across both tracks. The driver managed to contact Crewe and tell them of the incident, but no actions by Crewe or York could stop the other Super-Sprinter headcode 2H92 coming the other way.
1 death, conductor, and 30 injuries

2009: between Rugeley and Stafford,
A light plane crashed into the line, destroying the electricity lines running overhead the rail. Stopping trains.


What I'm trying to say is, modern rail is much safer than the earlier system. Less people die on the rails today than a hundred years ago. In my opinion, it is safer than roads... Most of the accidents on rails are human error or mother earth, natural, unreversable things. Or stupidity like people playing chicken with trains, how dumb can you get?!

So lets see other people's old rail accidents that caught their eye, or examples of safety (or safety flaws) of rail, or even stupidity, that makes me wonder, what is happening to society?

Thanks
Mitch

 

[jadebullet]

Add up all of the deaths in the great trainwrecks of Eastern Pennsylvania, and you will have less than the casualties of one plane crash. Heck, you can do it with almost any train crash death list.

But yeah, better signaling and communication have helped things alot. The main problem is stupid motorists.

Another improvement was the move from wooden coffin cars, which tended to telescope, then burst into flames, to steel cars.

 

[whitepass]

Working on a railroad was the most dangerous job in the US at one time, before air brakes and auto couplers.

 

[UP5521]

Working on a railroad was the most dangerous job in the US at one time, before air brakes and auto couplers.

yes and don't forget about working on steam locomotives as well!

 

[BigThing]

It is like the "flying is dangerous" stereotype, but when you consider the millions of flights every day it turns out that flying is the SAFEST form of transportation. Translation. You are more likely to die driving to an airport than flying!

Consider the millions of train journeys made every day, it cannot be too far behind.

BUT, modernisation (as in computer systems taking over roles previously taken by human's) in both the aviation and rail industries can cause mistakes to be made as they are relied on more.

 

[jadebullet]

Casualty wise, rail is safer.

 

[applegathc]

1980's Hinton Accident

I think this was back in the 80s, when Class 1's still had Caboose Operations, anyways it was a nice evening, the passengers of VIA Rail's Canadian no. 1 were enjoying a nice dinner, enjoying the scenery, and looking forward to seeing family in Vancouver.

A CN crew waits outside a crew change depot in a small town in BC in the cold. Many of them, like most freight crews back then, were heavily sleep deprived due to the random on-call off-call schedule. They finally hop aboard the freight train and are somewhat warmer inside the SD40. The ride is very long, the engineer is tired, depressed, and clinically ill, too ill to be driving a 11,000 ton freight train up a mountain grade I might add. But for some reason CN knows about his issue and ignores it. The train is going at a good pace, little do they know it will all go terribly, terribly wrong in only a matter of hours. The train is moving at moderate speed and brakemen, one of the crew members responsible for watching over and protecting the consist, succumbs to the hectic schedule and dozes off in the back of cab. The engineer and conductor take note of this but do not act accordingly. Soon enough he engineer is asleep at the throttle. What he doesn't realize in his slumber is that he has just run straight through the Stop Indication at the end of a siding where he was supposed to wait for the Canadian at.

The brakeman back in the caboose has tried multiple times to contact the head-end crew via radio communication, every attempt comes back with no results. He knows they've dozed off, but for some reason he does not pull the emergency lever. All odds are up against the approaching VIA...

A man inside one of the three dome cars on the Canadian is taking in the magnificent mountain scenery when he looks directly ahead of him and sees a light, not of a car or little house, but the headlights of locomotive on a freight train that is directly ahead of them. The hairs on the back of his neck start to prickle as he realizes that he is about to die. People stare in his direction confused , until they look in the direction of his frantic finger. His distress, along with the horrified expressions of the fellow passengers is to no avail as the two iron beasts run at each other like mountain goats. The VIA Rail engineer, horrified, hits the emergency brake and bails out the side of the locomotive but it's too late. People in the lounge and dining cars are thrown forward as the CN train plow's through the Canadian.

The scene was like a ring of hell from Dante's Inferno. Burnt, twisted metal and shrapnel from the impact lay strewn along the right-of-way. The air was thick with smoke and the screams of people in agonizing pain or people yelling out for lost family members. It was one of the most distressing places one could be. The brakeman in the caboose feels a fairly large jolt as the the back of train bumps to a stop. Fearing the worst, quickly climbs down from the caboose. He looks up realizes fully his dilemma. In a panic he runs the length of train to the wreckage sight. Survivors have already called emergency aid and he meets with Firefighters and EMS up front. He takes one look at the wreckage and collapses in grief thinking of his fellow crew members. He then realizes what a serious mistake he made when he didn't pull the emergency lever when he didn't get a radio response from the crew up front.



Now if I remember from the documentary, the brakeman was charged with criminal negligence and received a prison sentence.



Lessons learned from this?



cam

 

[mitch456yui]

Woah... Thats how dangerous fatigue is.

Just found another Settle & Carlisle crash, How dangerous do you think side-bars are? Answer after reading:
1960: Settle Rail Crash,
It was a snowy night, blowing a gale. BR Britannia No. 70052, Firth of Tay, was taking the 9:05pm Glasgow to London express. When coming down Ais Gill, going towards Garsdale, the driver heard a constant knocking he thought came from the side-bar big ends. The crew stopped at Garsdale and checked the loco, they didn't see anything in the dim light. So they continued along at 20-30mph. The fireman then saw sparking flying from the assembly. The whole rod had dropped from the last wheel. The driver applied the brake but he didn't stop early enough, a LMS Black 5 pulling a goods train was coming down the opposite track. How is that bad? The side-bar was ripping ballast and sleepers from under the ajacent track. The Black 5 derailed, and slammed into the side of the express.
5 deaths and 8 injuries
An investigation show that the Britannia had shed almost all of its side gear in the 10 miles before it reached the crash site!
It also showed that a nut holding the side-bar in place was not tightened before the trip, a problem seen as not that bad befin previous years. This resulted in a redesign of the nuts and bolts on the assembly.

Thanks
Mitch

 

[UP5521]

these aren't the only rail accidents that happened, look at the ones that happened on the AT&SF'S Cajon pass when some freight trains ran away and derailed,and one of these had a locomotive painted in the SP/AT&SF merger colors that spilled its payload and caused serveral people to evacuate from their homes and it killed some people who could not make out of there in time!

 

[Ronayne]

Heres a bit of info on a collision on the PRR between a EMC gas electris (doodlebug) and a freight train.


July 31, 1940 was an average summer day. It was warm, calm and peaceful. In fact, it was just like any other summer day, except...the "Doodlebug" crashed.

The gasoline-powered shuttle car, that operated on the Pennsylvania Railroad, was making its daily trek from Hudson to Akron. Many of the 46 passengers on the "Doodlebug" were commuters from jobs in Cleveland. Most of the passengers of the train were young. Some were students, some were prominent leaders in the community.

Traveling at 40 mph, the "Doodlebug" entered Cuyahoga Falls about a half an hour after it had left Hudson. Somehow the signals were mixed or ignored, and the shuttle car continued its journey at a steady clip. Just a few yards beyond the Front St. crossing, there was a 73 car freight train. The single car crashed, head-on, into the freight.

The crash caused the 350 gallon gasoline tank to explode enabling the burning gasoline to escape and cover the tracks, cars and people.
The impact of the collision threw the passengers and seats into the front of the car. People and debris were piled on top of one another, making it impossible for anyone to attempt an escape from the inferno.

There were three men who did survive the fatal crash, the engineer, conductor, and brakeman. Todd Wonn, of Akron, is the only one of the three that is still living. Wonn, sitting in the baggage compartment because the coach was full, noticed the conductor ran from the one end of the train to the other. He was a shouting something about a crash. Following his first instinct to jump, Wonn escaped from the crash, suffering only a cut on the head and torn ligaments in his ankle.

Pennsylvania Railroad authorities said the driver of the "Doodlebug" had received order in Hudson to take siding in Silver Lake, in order to allow the freight train to pass. Whether these orders were ignored or misunderstood is something that we will never know. According to railroad officials, both the Doodlebug and freight engineers had copies of the orders. No charges were held against the Doodlebug engineer or conductor.

^ A memorial stone from the accident

^ Heres an old picture of a doodlebug.

^ Heres the site of the accident.

 

[UP5521]

Oh my goodness, and to think accidents with steam engines was fatal,after reading the previous post, that made me believe that every railroad accident can be equally fatal!

 

[rjhowie]

Away back before WW1 we had a rather terrible train smash in Glasgow on one of the lines into the city centre. It was between 2 trains at Charing Cross station which is a tunnel and one station away from Queen Street (Low Level) in the city centre. Due to being in a tunnel situation although there was no roof at the station itself did not help the rescue. That line is still in use today as part of the suburban electric system.