Comment by amelius
5 hours ago
My gut feeling says a lot of fatalities could have been prevented with a physical barrier between both tracks. Shouldn't this be mandatory with high speed trains?
5 hours ago
My gut feeling says a lot of fatalities could have been prevented with a physical barrier between both tracks. Shouldn't this be mandatory with high speed trains?
I think the physics of the situation don't make a barrier feasible: a derailed train going >100 mph is going to transfer a lot of energy to any kind of barrier it impacts, which in turn might exacerbate the situation (by spreading debris).
I think these kinds of accidents are largely mitigated by rail defect monitoring. I know rails in the US are equipped with defect detectors for passing trains; I'm surprised that a similar system doesn't exist for the rails themselves. Or more likely, one does exist and the outcome of this tragedy will be a lesson about operational failures.
In principle only, if a barrier could keep a train on its side of the barrier, scraping along the barrier for a long distance instead of smashing headfirst into it, the energy could be dissipated over a long period of time, preventing fatalities. But what kind of barrier can withstand a train?
This collision happened precisely because of unfortunate circumstance that break in the rail and derailment happened just before the switch leading to the opposite track. Without the "help" of the switch, carriages of the first train likely wouldn't have invaded the second track.
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I’d rather they spent the money ensuring no trains ever left their tracks rather than halving the destruction if they do.
There was a switchover which made the derailed cars of the first train move into the track of the second one, you can't have a wall there anyway.
More practical but still probably unnecessary is having the planned “passes” be where the tracks are separated by some distance.
But that requires the trains mostly always being on schedule.
You happened to have an opposing train at exactly the point where the train derailed.
That's simply really, really rare bad luck.
Practically anything you can think of is going to be a more effective use of safety resources than trying to contain a derailing high-speed train.
The 20-ton bogie was flung 300m. What do you expect the weight of a whole car to do to such a wall?