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Speeding train kills 12 youths in Spain

fitzgibbon said:
Some years ago, I did a video about GO Transit here in Toronto, riding the trains (including in the cab) over the course of the summer. Once while riding the cab of the locomotive on the Stoufville train, we surprised a couple of dogs sitting in the middle of the tracks just out of the Scarborough station. This wasn't high speed territory by any stretch (30mph/50kph tops). Yet instinct forced both dogs to run up the tracks away from the train. Neither one made more than a slight thud when we ran them over.
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That's what happens when you have millions of years of evolution, but only about 150 years of trains...
 
aggle-rithm said:
I saw a show on TV that dealt with train accidents and the effect they have on the engineers. They interviewed one guy who was given several months leave after a fatal accident to recover from the trauma. On his FIRST DAY back on the job, a woman pushing a baby in a stroller tried to beat his train across the tracks, and as he bore down on her, one of the stroller's wheels got stuck. She managed to get it free in time, but...sheesh! What are people thinking?

Must be a lack of appreciation for basic physics.
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They gave him several months? That's impressive. Boston conductors only get two weeks after they hit someone. As I said in my post, their trains hit and kill 7 people on average in their careers.

Then again, my guess is that they probably are flexible if the person is just not up to coming back to work. I wonder if it's one of those things you get used to? After I was on the train that hit that guy, their was an interview with the conductor. It was his third suicide. He was sad, but he didn't seem too traumatized by it. He said the worst was the few seconds before, when you're blaring your train whistle and the person is just standing on the tracks, not moving, and you know they're not going to, and there's nothing you can do. Just a feeling of helplessness.

But in a train that killed 12 people, young people at that, and hurt 14 others? That poor, poor man.

About him being made a scapegoat though. Here in Boston, aside from suicides, people get hit pretty regularly by trains. It's not even a major news story when it happens, it'll get a little blip in the paper and that's it. When the accident is a result of stupidity, like walking across tracks where you shouldn't, people seem pretty comfortable with saying that it is tragic, but the victims own faults.

Though just the scale of this disaster could certainly change things.
 
Well, there are fences around a lot of tracks (at least in north-west europe), but you can't put a fence on the platform and that's where these kids jumped off.

While this was an accident through stupidity, I always have an extra dislike for the people who jump in front of trains as a form of suicide. Sure it's quick and probably painless for you, but you do give the driver a trauma, not to mention the guys who have to clean up the mess.
 
Lukraak_Sisser said:
Well, there are fences around a lot of tracks (at least in north-west europe), but you can't put a fence on the platform and that's where these kids jumped off.

While this was an accident through stupidity, I always have an extra dislike for the people who jump in front of trains as a form of suicide. Sure it's quick and probably painless for you, but you do give the driver a trauma, not to mention the guys who have to clean up the mess.
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i think he meant a fence on the other side of the track, it wouldnt prevent people from jumping off the platform onto the track, but it would make it so it isnt a practicable crossing and they would have to look for the underpass or something else
 
Lukraak_Sisser said:
Well, there are fences around a lot of tracks (at least in north-west europe), but you can't put a fence on the platform and that's where these kids jumped off.
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I meant a fence between lines, like this

.........+++++
...#############
.....-----------------
...#############
.........+++++

Where # is the track, + is the platform, and - is a fence, so there's no incentive to cross the track. It wouldn't stop jumpers, but would prevent needless accidents through laziness.

Then again, I think I've seen glass walls at some subways in Japan, which have openings synchronised with the opening of the train doors.
 
dudalb said:
I am really afraid some innocent scapegoat will be found.
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Development Minister Jose Blanco denied claims the underpass was poorly marked, and insisted that passengers should have known that "you never, never, never cross the tracks."

"Everything pointed to negligence," Blanco added, saying he hoped the tragedy would make riders understand that they must obey station rules.
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Source
 
aggle-rithm said:
That's what happens when you have millions of years of evolution, but only about 150 years of trains...
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Ten years ago I ran the numbers through my mind -- when you're being chased by something bigger and faster than you, you have evolved to take advantage of their mass by doing a sudden dodge. But you need to see which way they're gonna go, first, or else you'll just get caught because you turn, then they turn the same way, and you've just shortened the distance to you.

So, you need your attacker to commit to turn one way so you can go the other.

It's the same reason you run over squirrels -- the squirrel is evolved to think you, the car, is trying to catch it, so it keeps moving, assuming the car will turn to intercept. It never does, so the squirrel never sees it jig, so it never jags.


It's kind of interesting that pursuers never figured out to just keep running in a straight line and the idiot squirrel will leap into your mouth.
 
Against better judgement, yielding to temptation re coming up with frivolous and bad-taste stuff (not just marginal wordplay), about a definitely serious subject.

Long ago, there was in the west of Ireland, a certain lengthy narrow-gauge railway. The line was built on the cheap, and always rather shambolically operated, and its running involved numerous mishaps -- from the relatively minor to the catastrophic -- and such events were quite often lethal. The old-timers yarning about doings on the railway used to recollect, "there was one loco-driver who never killed a man..."
 
Though it isn't the cause of death in this case, the badly marked underpass may not be as trivial as you think. I personally know four people who once nearly lost their lives because of a badly marked bike path on a bridge.

Long story short: they were biking along a fairly well marked bike trial on an coast in Brooklyn. They came upon a bridge from the peninsula to the mainland. The kind of bridge for large vehicles, like trucks and city buses. The bike path on the bridge was on the left of the bridge while the bike path on land was on the right on the side of the road. Due to the fact that it was so poorly marked- no arrows, no standing signs, no painted path or signals on the ground, no lines marking the transition, nothing- that the path switched sides on the bridge and that it was hidden by large vehicles, they didn't know there was a bike path. They thought that it had broken off at the bridge. Adding to the confusion was that the path on the bridge only started at the very foot of the bridge and the land path broke off some yards from the bridge.

They took their bikes and rode over the bridge and were nearly killed several times over. And as soon as they managed to get off the horrible bridge, they were taken into custody by the toll booth and security people working on the bridge...who were all already waiting for them on the other side. To their shock, the unfortunate bikers were shown a beautifully fenced off and painted off bike path right on the other side of the bridge. The bridge workers were livid at them and screamed at them for putting their lives in such danger. They were promised a heavy summons and a handing over to the NYPD (not only was it dangerous, it was illegal to ride a bike over the bridge off the designated path) but the bridge workers eventually decided to let them go but only because they mistakenly thought that they were all tourists from Eastern Europe (one of them was, the other three aren't).
 
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chillzero said:
Which line was that?
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The Tralee & Dingle Railway (3ft. gauge, 1891 -- 1953) -- to railway-junkies such as myself, a most marvellous thing. I bitterly regret that I was born too late to experience it first-hand. It was abandoned, after some years of just-active terminal decrepitude, when I was aged four; I lived on the wrong island (in this context) of the British Isles, and my parents had no interest in visiting Ireland for any reason.
 
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