DING!
Full Moon, Bob?
Mark, not to make this a China-bashing post, but I have to ask you… how familiar are you with railroad operations? I ask this because of the report “a lightning strike caused the first train to lose power, and it was then rear-ended”.
If these are electrically-powered trains through either catenary or third-rail, I have to ask the first question… how close were these two trains? Following that, what exactly happened? Was the strike to the trainset? The power system? The signal system? If the first train was toasted by a power surge, why wasn’t the second one? What happened to automatic block signals? If the signal system was killed, why didn’t the engineer of the following train slow to a safe speed? If they were close enough together that the second train couldn’t stop in time, why wasn’t it effected as well?
There is OBVIOUSLY a)seriously deficient facts here… b) a major Coverup of the truth. Eitherway, the story as reported in this thread does NOT add up.
To make my point here, do you know why American semifores swung up to vertical instead of down to vertical like their british counterpart? Fail-safe. If ANYTHING went wrong, the semiphore was supposed to drop into the stop/restricting aspect through gravity alone. ANY safety system can be overriden by a determined enough terrorist or rushed enough idiot… case in point: Chase Maryland.
Curmudgeon said:Must be.
Full Moon, Bob?
There were a couple of railways in the UK that had upper quadrant type semaphores but most, as Jason comments, were lower. These had a weight included in the operating mechanism which allowed the same ‘fail-safe’ circumstance to occur. The former Great Western Railway (pre 1948) also had extra fail-safe system (ATC). later adopted after nationalization (AWS), on other lines. It was a the advanced warning system operated by a metal ramp which triggered a plunger beneath the locomotive. If a signal at caution was passed an audible signal operated in the loco cab. This had to be physically acknowledged by the engineer: if not the trains brakes were applied.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_Warning_System#GWR_Automatic_Train_Control
Jason, as familiar as most. And agreed not making this a China bashing thread or a them/us one as well. Regardless of the country of origin, or all the “fail-safes” put in place I find it alarming that still there are a significant number of train/train collisions in spite of all these precautions. There was one in Washington D.C. a couple years ago where one commuter train piled into the back of another, killing 9. Not long before that an Amtrak train rear-ended a freight outside of Chicago. Sadly there are plenty of examples. All we can do is learn from each, and re-invent our “fail-safes” to prevent further accidents.
Bob, please let me know if this is the “wrong” direction.
Jason asks all the questions I would, for whats touted as being a “state of the art” system, you get the feeling they were still using mechaincal semiphores and written orders passed to the engineers on hoop to communicate. As soon as the first train was disabled, every other train on that same line not effected, should have been automaticly by computer or verbally via radio ordered to either stop or slow down until the system damage could be assessed, something went very wrong somewhere, but of course unless someone talks or memos get leaked, we’ll never know the truth, watch them turn around and blame the consultants.
Usually when a ‘weak-link’ in a system is broken, an upgraded improvement is put in it’s place. Hopefully the ‘silver lining’ in this trade will include some of the suggestions made here.
Red China may eventually raise it’s production standards and protection of intellectual property as the West has done. As far as pricing and greed, check your own labels before condemning businesses.
The problem with fixing a weak link is that another weak link is soon found.
The solution is to fix the whole system, starting with shooting the designer and politicians, “pour l’encouragement de les autres.”
Hearing now it took 20 minutes between the stall and the collision. Also that the Gov. tried to bury the car wreckage claiming they contain "sensitive technology " before public outcry forced them to stop. So the brownian matter is starting to hit the fan as something is rotten in Denmark …or Bejing.
And yet even so, no further details on how this accident occurred… or even the facts of WHAT occurred.