Railways Blog

A talgo passenger train has collided head on with an intermodal freight in Spain. According to BBC News, the death toll has now risen to 19, and is expected to rise as some of the wrecked and burned carraiges haven’t yet been searched.

A head on collision on a single line track is just about the worst possible accident, with almost all the kinetic energy from the two trains going into disintegrating the trains themselves. With diesel haulage there’s a great risk of fire as fuel tanks rupture. Sadly this is what happened in the Spanish crash.

We’re lucky in Britain that such accidents are very rare, thanks to the fact that almost all main lines are double track. I can only remember one single line collision in the past thirty years, at Crowden in Sussex. Other head ons, such as the Ladbrooke Grove disaster have been conflicting movements across junctions.

On the subject of suburbs, this is what happens when you let a railfan design suburban housing estates. It’s from Tamworth, a suburb of Birmingham.

BBC NEWS | England | North Yorkshire | Museum talks ‘dirty’

Just when you thought things could not get any sillier…

A leading museum is talking dirty and using mobile text message slang to attract younger staff.

Posters showing a pair of oily handprints on a woman’s tight jeans have been put up in clubs and bars across York to try to tempt younger people to become volunteers at the National Railway Museum.

The poster uses the slogan “Get down and dirty” while another uses the text message “Ifu think trAns R ZzZz thnk x2″ (If you think trains are boring think again).

For those interesting in transport issues, Perverse Access Memory discusses commuting. It seems a dumb Republican politician is complaining that his 28 mile commute takes a whole 30 minutes! The horror! More and more roads must be built immediately! I bet he drives an SUV

BBC NEWS | UK | Terrorism fear derails train-spotters

First they came for the fox hunters.
But because I didn’t hunt foxes, I did nothing.

Then they came for the trainspotters

Who will be next?

Train-spotters are being told to leave stations as rail bosses tighten anti-terror security, BBC News Online can reveal.

To many people, train-spotters are a joke.

To Network Rail, the company which now runs the UK’s train network, they are potential terrorists.

One suspects this is an excuse. I suspect overzealous private security guards (and the dreaded British Transport Police) would rather harass a harmless and innocent group rather than, say, deal with drunken football supporters who might actually fight back.

Perhaps they think trainspotters are a “bad image”, having listened to too many third rate comedians that pick on train enthusiasts because they’re not allowed pick on racial minorities any more.

Or, as in the last paragraph, it’s the latest paranoia coming over from America.

But a meeting of US security officials in Washington in March reportedly classified “people sitting on train platforms who appear to be monitoring the timing of arrivals and departures” as suspicious behaviour.

Perhaps it’s time for rail enthusiasts to fight back? I’m thinking along the lines of the Kinder Scout mass trespass by ramblers a few decades back. What about a mass trainspot at one of the “Forbidden” stations?

Not that I’m advocating trespass on the actual tracks, of course. Just a large number of people descending onto the publically accessible parts of a big station, all holding the valid train tickets they used to get there. Perhaps some Network Rail accountant might like to add up the value of all those tickets?

There’s been some discussion of this on the DEModellers mailing list. One poster noted that regular Railfans could be a significant resource in combating terrorism and vandalism. Since almost all of us have cameras and most of us have mobile phones, we can report those trespassing on the tracks, vandalising stations, or acting suspiciously.

Update: I Like Adam Warr’s take on the issue.

It’s sad when a online community dies. Sometimes a thriving community is broken up when the online service that hosts it decides one day to close it down. Sometimes communities die a long drawn out death as the membership of the online service that hosts it declines. I’ve seen both of these happen.

And sometimes it self-destructs because the membership just can’t get along.

Or worse still, a group is destroyed through a moment of madness from some of the people that are supposed to be the moderators of the group.

Let’s hope the enough of the former membership regroups in a new place, and spirit of the group survives in some form, somewhere.

Update: Looks like that’s happened, as can be seen here.

Update 2: Look at the modified “Net Communities” blogroll, which I have now updated to reflect the new reality.

19 minutes late yesterday.

A full Reginald Perrin-syle 22 minutes late today

I’m getting fed up with this. The 8:24 from Cheadle Hulme (8:04 from Manchester) had been quite reliable up to a couple of weeks ago, but has gone badly pear-shaped in the last few weeks. Every other day nowadays it seems to be late.

Part of the problem seems to be the ‘efficient’ (from an operator’s point of view) use of stock. The class 323 set used on this train previously works a Stoke-on-Trent to Manchester working, due in at 8:00. Yes, folks, that’s just a four minute turnaround. Wonder why it often runs late?

I have no way of telling if things will get better or worse after the timetable change at the end of the month. During the summer the Stoke line will be closed for rebuilding, and all Virgin Trains services to Manchester to London and Birmingham will run via Crewe. Will congestion on that route cause even more delays?

Still, only four more days till I go to Switzerland, where trains run on time, and seem to run for the benefit of passengers (not ‘customers’) rather than accountants.

BBC NEWS | World | Europe | Many dead in Hungary crash

Once again, a disaster on a level crossing. An express train hit a bus full of elderly German tourists, and 33 people are dead, all of them from the bus. Although the train was derailed, the train driver survived, and there were no serious injuries among the passengers.

It may be that initial eyewitness reports turn out to be inaccurate; but it appears that the bus driver entered the crossing ignoring the flashing red light. Whether through inattention or pure recklessness we’ll never know; the driver died in the crash.

Such accidents are relatively rare in Britain, where the majority of road/rail crossings have barriers, and the only ungated crossings are either on branch lines with few trains, or minor roads with low traffic. I think they assess the risk by multplying the number of trains on the line by the average number of road vehicles using the road, and there will be barriers in the result is greater than n.

It’s an open question as to who’s responsibility it should be to pay for safety equipment on level crossings. At the moment it seems to be the railway authorities that have to come up with the money, when 99% of all crossing accidents are caused by inattentive or reckless road users.

When you’re building a small 12′ by 2′ shelf layout because that’s all you’ve got room for, things like this can make you jealous, both of the space, and the likelyhood of remaining in the same place for long enough to get something substantial built!

Even if you don’t model American railroads, such things are wonderful inspiration. It’s just the sort of thing I’d love to build a British-based equivalent of, something like the Cornwall main line between Lostwithiel (or perhaps further east!) and the terminus of Penzance.

Transport Blog links to this article, The New, Neighborly Architecture by Philip Langdon and Andres Duany, about alternatives to the typical low density suburbia of many American cities.

I’ve read many articles on the blogosphere about the failure of suburban light and heavy rail in America, and the apparent addiction of Americans to their cars. The trouble seems to be that the layout of American cities doesn’t give any real alternatives. The population density of most places is too low for any form of mass transit to be economically viable, and the result is cities where it’s simply not possible to live without a car.

Sometimes I wonder if American commentators that advocate light rail have visited Europe and seen the vibrant city centres and efficient mass transit there, and then wanted to recreate this in American cities. But simply building light rail systems won’t change things. The suburbs, designed and built around the car, are too just spread out.

As I’ve mentioned before, three years ago, my then employer closed it’s UK development centre and relocated it to Atlanta, Georgia. Although I was offered the chance to relocate, as a non driver there was no way I could live in the suburban spawl where the company had it’s offices.

I’m glad to see that at least some Americans are looking at alternatives, and recognising that the car suburb isn’t the only way.