Mutter, rant : comments [Matthew's Journal]

why did the train derail in such a catastrophic fashion?". How about "because it hit a car at 100mph!"?

Is that definitely the speed it was travelling at? According to my mother, who is amongst other things a qualified locomotive driver, a train hitting a car at that speed should ordinarily throw the car clear of the tracks without derailing. She was trained not to slow down for cars on the track, because the car driver is likely to be killed in the collision at any speed, but the train passengers have a much better chance if the train does not slow down. It happened for real in one of their training sessions (not while she was driving, mercifully for her.)

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Well, that's that the BBC was reporting. Whether that's a journalist mangling a statistic about the maximum speed on that section of track, I don't know.

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I think that's the line speed of that section of track, and an InterCity train would definitely have been travelling at something approaching line speed.

(S)

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According to the reports I heard, the driver applied the brakes before impact, but too late to avoid it, so the impact would have been at significant, but not full, speed.

The train did stay upright initially, just as the GNER train at Selby did[1]. It seems that what caused the carriages to overturn was hitting points about 100m beyond the crossing. Presumably the front wheels of the loco had derailed and tried to follow the tracks into the siding while the rest of the train (at that point still on the tracks) tried to go straight on.

[1] Unfortunately that was sufficiently derailed to be in the path of the oncoming goods train.

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February