Two goals for the 2014 election season

[Paulus]

Nathaniel, compare Eschede with Chase. 'Nuff said.

Eschede was an unsurvivable crash no matter what safety regulations you are under. There's pretty much nothing you can do to survive slamming into a bridge at 120mph and then having it collapse on you (and, if memory serves, the designs are for a locomotive led collision, not a car derailing into something separately). Meanwhile Amtrak lucked out on Chase by having mostly empty forward cars. Per the NTSB:

The lead car of train 94 was so thoroughly crushed that had the car been occupied, almost none aboard could have survived the crash. Fortunately,thecar served as a buffer much as a baggage car would. It was also fortunate that there were only 25 passengers aboard the second car, which had 84 seats. More than half the passengers in this car were fatally injured, and the emergency response personnel had great difficulty in extricating injured passengers. Had the car been filled to capacity, as were most of the cars to the rear, the toll of fatally-injured passengers would have been much higher.

For that matter, at those speeds, I don't think anyone's willing to claim that there's anything that can be reasonably done design wise to improve survival, there's simply too much energy.

 

[George Harris]

Nathaniel, compare Eschede with Chase. 'Nuff said.

Eschede was an unsurvivable crash no matter what safety regulations you are under. There's pretty much nothing you can do to survive slamming into a bridge at 120mph and then having it collapse on you (and, if memory serves, the designs are for a locomotive led collision, not a car derailing into something separately). Meanwhile Amtrak lucked out on Chase by having mostly empty forward cars. Per the NTSB:

The lead car of train 94 was so thoroughly crushed that had the car been occupied, almost none aboard could have survived the crash. Fortunately,thecar served as a buffer much as a baggage car would. It was also fortunate that there were only 25 passengers aboard the second car, which had 84 seats. More than half the passengers in this car were fatally injured, and the emergency response personnel had great difficulty in extricating injured passengers. Had the car been filled to capacity, as were most of the cars to the rear, the toll of fatally-injured passengers would have been much higher.

For that matter, at those speeds, I don't think anyone's willing to claim that there's anything that can be reasonably done design wise to improve survival, there's simply too much energy.

Cars may have crumpled at Chase, but they did not literally come apart at the seams like they did at Eschede. Admittedly, there may not be much difference in the outcme between being crushed in the vehicle as at Chase and being thrown all over the countryside as at Eschede, but these were both off the charts for anybody's standards. There were so many things wrong at Eschede it would take a while just to make the list much less a discussion of them. Suffice to say that given the American standards for wheels, structures, and vehicles Eschede would not have happened at all, much less been so catastrophic. Chase was much simpler. Very simple, indeed. An intoxicated engineer overran the end of the track he was running on so that the passenger train simply ran into him at speed. I would suspect that mass represented by 3 diesels end on exceeded that of a light duty two lane road structure hit sideways.

Nathaniel, I have been reading ICC, then NTSB accident reports for about 40 years by now, and a good bit of my thoughts on what is good and no good is based on discussions of hov vehicles and fixed facilities have performed when things go wrong. One thing I have also learned: When the contents and basis of some standard or regulation is not understood the easiest way to disparage it is to throw around some date in reference to it, the more distant in the past, the better.

There are things in American regulations on safety and other things that can be improved, yes, but throwing them out wholesale is NOT the answer. People on this side of the ocean do at least read them and have some understanding of what is in the Euronorms. There are good things there, buth there are also in them that leave you saying "why oh why?", "no way would anybody really do that," and other less polite reactions.

 

[Paulus]

Nathaniel, compare Eschede with Chase. 'Nuff said.

Eschede was an unsurvivable crash no matter what safety regulations you are under. There's pretty much nothing you can do to survive slamming into a bridge at 120mph and then having it collapse on you (and, if memory serves, the designs are for a locomotive led collision, not a car derailing into something separately). Meanwhile Amtrak lucked out on Chase by having mostly empty forward cars. Per the NTSB:

The lead car of train 94 was so thoroughly crushed that had the car been occupied, almost none aboard could have survived the crash. Fortunately,thecar served as a buffer much as a baggage car would. It was also fortunate that there were only 25 passengers aboard the second car, which had 84 seats. More than half the passengers in this car were fatally injured, and the emergency response personnel had great difficulty in extricating injured passengers. Had the car been filled to capacity, as were most of the cars to the rear, the toll of fatally-injured passengers would have been much higher.

For that matter, at those speeds, I don't think anyone's willing to claim that there's anything that can be reasonably done design wise to improve survival, there's simply too much energy.

Cars may have crumpled at Chase, but they did not literally come apart at the seams like they did at Eschede. Admittedly, there may not be much difference in the outcme between being crushed in the vehicle as at Chase and being thrown all over the countryside as at Eschede, but these were both off the charts for anybody's standards. There were so many things wrong at Eschede it would take a while just to make the list much less a discussion of them. Suffice to say that given the American standards for wheels, structures, and vehicles Eschede would not have happened at all, much less been so catastrophic. Chase was much simpler. Very simple, indeed. An intoxicated engineer overran the end of the track he was running on so that the passenger train simply ran into him at speed. I would suspect that mass represented by 3 diesels end on exceeded that of a light duty two lane road structure hit sideways.

My complaint on using Chase is more that it's dishonest to try and compare fatalities with it when they were only as low as they were because there was hardly anybody in the front of the train. Switch things around (if it were the rear cars were left empty for the northern boarders for instance) and you're dealing with a 120+ fatality crash which has me wondering what the regulatory response to that would have been.

 

[George Harris]

My complaint on using Chase is more that it's dishonest to try and compare fatalities with it when they were only as low as they were because there was hardly anybody in the front of the train. Switch things around (if it were the rear cars were left empty for the northern boarders for instance) and you're dealing with a 120+ fatality crash which has me wondering what the regulatory response to that would have been.

My complalint with this whole "how wonderful things are under the Euronorms" is that we do not get enough information to make an honest comparison. Partly that is becasue railroad accidents that happen there are simply not reported at all here, tend to be treated more like local news there, and anything that could be construed as being an embarassment to the agencies or goverrnments tends to be covered there rather that waved wildly in the public as tends to be the practice in the US. Some digging can bring out a different picture.

 

[Green Maned Lion]

I didn't talk about fatalities. Most of the cars on the Chase train are STILL IN SERVICE. It is possible some of the scrap metal from Eschede has been repurposed back into rail somewhere I suppose.

 

[Paulus]

I didn't talk about fatalities. Most of the cars on the Chase train are STILL IN SERVICE. It is possible some of the scrap metal from Eschede has been repurposed back into rail somewhere I suppose.

What does it matter if the cars are still in service? The point is occupant survival, not car usability post crash. If you want to compare Chase to something, try comparing it to Ladbroke which is a far better example, though neither the HST or the Turbo were built with CEM in mind.

 

[Green Maned Lion]

Bro, I am confident that if the Eschede disaster happened with Amfleets, more would have survived. I can't prove it. I can prove that when a ICE 1 derailed at 120 miles per hour 40% of the passengers on board died, another 30% were severely injured, every car that was involved in the impact was a pile of scrap metal and all of the non casualties were forward of the derailment.

I can also demonstrate that when an Amcan set derailed 5 mph faster with a force collision of similar magnitude, of its 660 passengers, 2.4% died, 25% were injured, and only 3 cars and the lead locomotive were not returned to service. Any questions?

 

[Paulus]

Bro, I am confident that if the Eschede disaster happened with Amfleets, more would have survived. I can't prove it. I can prove that when a ICE 1 derailed at 120 miles per hour 40% of the passengers on board died, another 30% were severely injured, every car that was involved in the impact was a pile of scrap metal and all of the non casualties were forward of the derailment.

I can also demonstrate that when an Amcan set derailed 5 mph faster with a force collision of similar magnitude, of its 660 passengers, 2.4% died, 25% were injured, and only 3 cars and the lead locomotive were not returned to service. Any questions?

And I can also demonstrate that, had the cars been occupied rather than empty, the death toll would have exceeded Eschede by a considerable margin. You cannot just go gallivanting about ignoring critical factors like that. Every single passenger in that lead Amcan would have died and as it was half of them in the second Amcan did die. Lack of fatalities in empty cars do not prove safety and to try to pretend otherwise, as you're doing, is incredibly dishonest.

Seriously, this is just nonsense. You're comparing a derailment with offset/side impact into a bridge, with subsequent collapse, with loaded cars to a head on collision with a lead locomotive and an empty car ahead of any passengers.

 

[jis]

I tend to agree with Paulus on this one. It is an apples to oranges comparison, and I don't think any definitive conclusions can be drawn from those two cases at all. but as for anyone whose mind is already made up that should not matter now, should it?