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Bullet Train Derails In China
chrb writes "Xinhua is reporting that a Chinese bullet train has derailed, resulting in two of the train's coaches falling off a bridge. This comes only a few months after officials at the Railways Ministry expressed concerns that builders had ignored safety standards in the quest to build faster trains in record time — a claim that was subsequently retracted."
According to reports, a lightning strike caused the first train to lose power and was subsuequently rear-ended by a second train.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinkansen#Safety_record
I don't know if it is necessarily corner cutting, but one would have thought lightning protection would have been one of the obvious things they would have engineered. From the articles, the lightning strike disabled the train and the train behind slammed into it. Also, if a train is stalled on the track, one would think there would be someway of knowing; either through telemetry or the driver radioing "Help! My train's stuck!". So if so, why didn't the other train stop? Lots of questions... I wonder if we will ever truly learn the answers or will this become another of China's "let's sweep it under the carpet" moments?
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My cynical nature seems to be not surprised about "that builders had ignored safety standards", in China.
One thing that should be mentioned is looking at the photos of the Chinese bullet train, is that the design did not inspire itself on one of the key advantages of the French TGV. That advantage being that the bogies are between the carriages and not under each carriage. Apparently the French designed it that way because it reduces the scope of damage due to derailment. The TGV has derailed, but it always derails in a straight line.
ref: Nova: Looking down the track at very fast trains
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
At least 11 people have died and 89 people injured
You would think this important information would be in the summary to give perspective on the disaster.
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From TFA:
Feh. Amtrak, and even some commuter trains in the Northeast, routinely exceed 110-125mph.
The Siemens trains sold in Melbourne had shoddy brakes among other problems, yet I see cars and other shit advertised as "German engineered" on TV.
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The reports currently are that the train cars detailed because of a collision, not because they were simply going too fast and took a sharp turn on faulty rails. Can you really expect cars to remain on the tracks after a collision?
Everyone knows lightning never strikes the same train twice.
If you mod me down the terrorists will have won
No, a "retraction" means taking back, by the original commentators. In this case, some other official merely denied the claims of the whistleblower.
or some basic railway safety like a working signal system that stops a train on the same track from hitting one in front of it with a block size that gives it time to slow down and or stop before it even gets to the block that the train in front of it is in. Also do they have a treat a black signal as a red one?
alot of them come from have a car on the tracks when the gates are down.
OTOH, Hey - China has bullet trains. I bet their safety record is still better than commuting on the 405
If you mod me down the terrorists will have won
the railway signal system should do something but the driver may be under presser to go as fast as they can and not stop.
Topical, well played.
Yes, quite odd that two similar stories pop up like that. We've got a horrible trainwreck that will result in a media circus, and a train crashed as well.
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At least they had brakes.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Hollysys claims to be the main supplier of signalling and train protection equipment for China's high speed rail lines. There are two separate systems - classic track circuits, and a data link between units at the head and tail of each train to a train control center. Either is normally able to prevent collisions. However, in a power failure, the data link system would probably not be functioning. The track circuit system should continue to work on battery power, or, if that fails, indicate STOP.
Track circuit failures resulting in a false proceed signal are rare, but have occurred. The WMATA transit crash in Washington, D.C. was due to a track circuit failure. The US Federal Railroad Administration keeps records of all reported false proceed signals. There have been two recorded events in 10 years of false proceed indications due to lightning damage.
I don't like the summary - from the article: A Chinese high-speed train derailed Saturday when it was hit by another express, state media said, throwing two carriages off a viaduct and killing at least 16 people.
Still I don't understand all the details of the situation.
Greed is ultimately to blame. Authoritarianism just makes it easier to shrug it all off when things go to shit like this.
In any other country where this happened there would be a few mea culpas and some compensation to pay, a few internal enquiries finding failures that were "unfortunate" and "avoidable", but ultimately nobody goes to prison and everybody (but the victims) moves on with nothing having changed. Beyond these theatrics of conscience there is no difference between the Chinese method and that practiced in the West.
Spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and stupid comments are intentional.
I am certainly glad that here in the United States of America, blessed by God and common sense, that we will never experience a tragedy of this magnitude. Thanks to our sensible legislators and their neverending compassion for the people whose livelihood depends on the exploration, excavation, processing, shipping, and selling of fossil fuels, we will never have to see one of these "bullet" trains derail in this country! Our citizens will remain safe! Why, the very name of these things, a "bullet" train, brings to mind only the horror and tragedy of random school violence. Not, of course, that this has anything to do with the abundance of firearms in our nation, no, but the analogy is still valid.
These trains must be banned. We need a constitutional amendment to prevent this sort of thing from ever happening here.
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Riiiiight. What about the 'big governments' in Europe and their bullet trains? Pinnacles of human achievement or an example of how it 'doesn't work'?
Or the lightning is the new official story because they don't want to admit the train derailed due to shoddy construction caused by rampant corruption.
Need some confirmation of what happened.
Anarchists never rule
You would think these safety systems should be virtually fail-safe.
But then there wouldn't be Fukushima I guess.
You can design systems to be fail-safe all day long, but eventually nature has a lot more fail to offer than you can every reasonably design for.
That was true for Fukushima (which survived way more than it was designed to handle, resulting in only minor radiations leaks) . And it may be true for this situation as well, if we find the lightning led to a false proceed signal.
It does seem like it must be possible to design a more robust train on track detection mechanism though, or some fallback that is immune from local effect - like a GPS transmitter on each track, that if you lose signal for is an automatic stop for all trains behind. But then perhaps that raises the risk of too many false stops...
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I see a flood of patronizing posts and many of them xenophobic. Look, I'm not crazy about the Chinese regime/economic system (or the US regime/economic system), but train accidents occur all the time and even in the most "superior" societies. Here are some derailments in the last decade involving injuries.
Hatfield, UK, 2000, 4 dead, 70+ injured - exposed sloppiness in privatized infrastructure and poor oversight.
Potters Bar, UK, 2002, 7 dead, 76 injured - poor maintenance.
Waterfall, Australia, 2003, 7 dead, 40 injured - driver heart attacked, train failed to automatically stop, deadman's pedal insufficient and may have been defeated, guard failed to take action, training shortcomings found.
Grayrigg, UK, 2007, 1 dead, 88 injured - points mis-set.
Jiao-Ji, China, 2008, 70+ killed, 400+ injured - excessive speed, collision
Larissa, Greece, 2008, 29 injured - possible human error or points failure.
Orissa, India, 2009, 9 dead, 150 injured - cause unknown.
... in addition to 10 people dieing in a train, another 200-300 died in other traffic accidents in China on the same day. If you ask me, I'd take the Chinese bullet train. (China has 1.3bn people and 7.6 out of 100.000 die each year in traffic accidents.)
In France the TGVs carry explosives (fireworks, basically) to put on the rails one kilometer ahead of a failed train, to warn the oncoming train of a problem.
At one kilometre ahead of the stopped train, they arent going to warn of anything coming up behind the stopped train
Again, journalists have it wrong. The one and only bullet train that is in production in China, is in Shanghai. This train is made out of German technology, can reach 430 km, and links the city (Long Yang Lu station) center to the Pudong airport. Then you have "Gao Tie", the Chinese TGV. Such trains would be marked as "G" then a number. "Dong Chi" would be D, and they are all but bullet trains. How come the journalist wrote "bullet trains" for these "Dong Chi" is a mystery!!!
Which brings me to the main problem: I know the Chinese use the European Train Control System and not something a few interns came up with during a coffee break. I can't imagine that the system doesn't default to having all trains come to a full stop, not to mention that the system still uses blocks and the second train should never have gotten the clearance for that block unless the first train had cleared the next one. (fully, both axle counters and the data bus on the train itself is used to confirm integrity. That wasn't an issue here, my point is that it requires an active confirmation so a blackout defaults to the safe state)
Oh well, their maglev also burned down after they had done some "inspections" on the electronics.
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
How does your argument stand up when looking at Japan, which has had bullet trains for 47 years and no fatalities? (state run for the first 23 years and no accidents then)
Even if a train stops on the tracks.
At least they are supposed to.
Even though this failure doesn't appear to have anything to do with the previous concerns about cost-cutting on track construction, it does show a huge screw-up that may be attributable to improper safety standards or not following them.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
China has many different railway suppliers and systems. Does anyone know if it was CTCS the Chinese Train Control System used on this line? These systems are expensive so China developed their own version of the European train control system. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Train_Control_System
For high-speed trains they pass the signals too fast for the drivers to see so they rely on computer control. Trains are supposed to communicate so if one in front stops or slows the other behind it knows where it is and so can slow down and stop. If the lightning fried the first train it could explain why the second didn't stop, but these systems are supposed to be design so if the first time suddenly goes quiet the second train assumes the worst and slows down to a stop until it is clear to proceed. Maybe they didn't think of that?
Yes, slashdot summary isn't good. Derailing is the end result. A collision between two bullet trains is what caused it. Maybe OP was in a rush to submit the story.
When the group of people who decide the official version of the story are the same group of people who are likely to benefit from bribery and under-table dealings, AND are the group of people most likely to get punished if word of corruption and under-table dealings gets out, it is hard to believe anything they say.