A professor of Milan Polytechnic said that the concrete of the bridge, which was built in the Sixties, was probably weakened by the salt used in winters to melt the snow and ice on the road, a main highway going from Milano to Lecco and Switzerland. My son in law, his wife my daughter and their kids often travel that highway.
Tullio

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Yes the bridge was either long overdue for replacement or another engineer is facing jail time.

Cheers.

Many building and road works are often assigned to the lowest bidders, this by law, and you can see the results in the buildings demolished by quakes.
Tullio

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6 Dead, 10 Hospitalized After MTA Bus, School Bus Collide In SW Baltimore

http://baltimore.cbslocal.com/2016/11/01/mta-bus-crashes-with-school-bus-in-southwest-baltimore/

Federal and local authorities are continuing to investigate what led to a bus collision that left six people dead and 10 others injured on Tuesday morning in Baltimore.

Investigators say a school bus was traveling eastbound near the 3800 block of Frederick Avenue when it hit a Mustang, then struck a pillar at Loudon Park Cemetery. Finally, it hit the oncoming No. 10 MTA bus from Dundalk to Catonsville.

“It is with great sadness that I express condolences on behalf of the city to the families that were impacted by this tragic bus accident today,” said Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake. ” You realize that Baltimore is a big city but also a small town when something like this happens there are so many connections to the individuals who were lost today.”

Six people were killed in the wreck, including bus drivers of both the school bus and the the MTA bus, officials said. There were no children on the school bus at the time of the crash.

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Pregnant driver reverses off Ramsgate harbour wall

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Some pot holes are larger than others.



Giant sinkhole collapses road in Fukuoka, Japan

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Grant
Darwin NT

That's a sad fact regarding transport. It takes a major incident to impose safety features.

"Trams are not fitted with any safety protection systems that apply the brakes automatically if they are going too fast, according to the Office of Rail and Road."

The driver who has been arrested may have fallen asleep as well as other factors according to the BTP.

Would be nice to know what those factors are.

Would be nice to know what those factors are.

Having ridden a tram many times down that very gradient, my feeling always was it was too steep for trams and they often seemed to go too fast.

That is the point where the trams from/to Croydon, join/leave the old Woodside and South Croydon Joint Railway which ran in a very deep cutting. The trams descend from street level over a very short length to run on the same rail bed as the old trains. However if you notice on some of the photos of the accident you will see very sharp curves. The tram line joined the old line at 90 degrees and separates into two tracks one runs south and one north following the line of the old track.

So not only a steep slope but a very sharp bend at the bottom of the slope. The RAIB have said the tram was going to fast, if it was coming down the slope as it appears from the pictures then it would almost certainly derail.

Saw those curves so surely the RAIB or other rail authority must have realised that it could be a potential issue, yet no safety features?

I know hindsight is nice, but it always take an incident like this to make improvements, but that will not comfort the 7 dead & 51 injured.

Results of the crash testing of 2 popular Mexican cars.
Interesting to see the effects on the inside of the car- from 1:05 in particular.

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Grant
Darwin NT

Very relevant juxtaposition of posts. The thing that's surprised me isn't that the tram fell off the tracks, but that so many people died as a result.

I thought the conventional wisdom was that deaths usually resulted either from people being thrown out of the passenger safety cage, or from outside objects penetrating into it - like that oncoming car.

From the pictures we've seen so far, neither of those seems to apply here - unless the tram fell onto some lineside equipment that poked through the windows on what is now the underside. So why did people die?

As you say Richard, the "normal", or "received" wisdom is that people die in rail accidents when they leave the vehicle. However in two accidents that I can think one of the biggest sources of injury (and sadly, death) were "internal projectiles" - for example: items of luggage, other people and fist sized lumps of glass held together by the numerous sticky labels that adorn train windows these days. Another factor is that these trams have very few seats, thus a very high proportion of standing passengers and human beings don't like being dumped on their heads :-(

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Bob Smith
Member of Seti PIPPS (Pluto is a Planet Protest Society)
Somewhere in the (un)known Universe?

OK adding a little more information, now they have said which way the tram was going, it seems the slope was not a factor.

In this picture



The tram had come round the curve from the right of the picture and the front of the tram is nearest the camera.

Having ridden these trams many times, I too am a little surprised at the number of dead and injured. I suspect it may be due to quite a few people standing, I rarely sit down.

From looking at the topography on google maps, it seems as if the tram was climbing the slope from the old heavy rail line, so gradient is unlikely to have played a part.

In any event, trams/light rail were used for a long time in the hilly north of England (and Scotland): my nearest city of Bradford is built in a bowl almost entirely surrounded by hills, and all the main roads out have gradients of varying severity. The steepest - Church Bank, past the Cathedral - is still a struggle for modern buses, and was the scene of a major accident over 100 years ago.

Images and Board of Trade report

The centenary prompted reminiscences in the local paper, but I get the impression that it was largely remembered because it was such a rare event, and happened right at the entrance to one of the main public squares in the city centre. As the Telepragh & Argus (local paper) recalled on the centenary, nobody died - even though the flimsy wooden bodies of the early street cars were completely destroyed in even low-speed impacts.

It does seem as if the offspring of the modern marriage of street car with (relatively) high speed light rail may have failed to inherit some important lessons from its respective parents. While human control is (probably? - discuss) best in the shared urban traffic of the town centre, the high-speed segments on segregated/dedicated track perhaps require a different approach.

To which you can add Hatfield, where the human error involved was selling off track maintenance into the private sector.

Do we ban public transport, or humans being involved in it? Sometime the choice is made harder ..... The DLR seems fine.

I don't think you can consider banning public transport on safety grounds, unless you also look at doing the same for the main replacement - private cars. Wikipedia quotes a World Health Organisation estimate of 1.25 million deaths worldwide through road traffic injuries in the year 2010. I'm going from memory here, rather than statistical sources, but I think the statistical accident risk rate goes something like this:

• cycling (pedal and motor)
  
• private cars
  
• buses
  
• (I suppose trams might go here?)
  
• trains
  
• aircraft
  

- in decreasing order. And partly because of that, but also because of the larger number of potential victims in each vehicle, it's the least risky modes of transport which generate the biggest headlines when something does go wrong.

The DLR - Docklands Light Railway in London - is a special case because it runs on completely segregated track (according to that article, there's only one level crossing on the entire system - and that's on a private road in the depot), and the sections I've used seem to run at a relatively low speed. But having exclusive control of both track and trains has enabled them to deploy full automation, which should at least match speeds to track geometry in all cases.

Looking at Bernie's railcam images in the train thread (most notably Ashland), I've always been struck (if that's the right word, under the circumstances) by the 'openness' of the railroad infrastructure in the States. Here in the UK, railway tracks and stations are always fenced off, even in the remotest rural areas. That doesn't totally prevent fatal contact between trains and drivers/pedestrians, but it must help - at the expense of a much more cluttered and controlling local environment.

Be nice if you can refrain from adding your personal digs.

To clarify further, for those who use the system it is all London Underground. For those who/did work on it, the Underground is known as sub-surface while the Tubes are deep level underground.

The tubes asides from the stations are too filthy for true automation to work effectively as witnessed by the Victoria Line several years after opening.

Secondly with crews, mishaps can be dealt with quickly & efficiently. With no crews, what happens if a train had a trainline or mainline burst in a tunnel...

...oops!

On this if wrong, I trust someone more knowledgeable can correct me. While growing up I can recall a tram having a similar operating system to trains - a power up/down controller (with a deadman where if one fell asleep, deadman takes over) & brake control...

...what changed?

I've always been struck (if that's the right word, under the circumstances) by the 'openness' of the railroad infrastructure in the States. Here in the UK, railway tracks and stations are always fenced off, even in the remotest rural areas. That doesn't totally prevent fatal contact between trains and drivers/pedestrians, but it must help - at the expense of a much more cluttered and controlling local environment.

I think the difference is that a certain proportion of the UK network is electrified third rail, you need to keep animals and people away from that. Else it is overhead catenaries or Diesel electric. The USA is so vast and much is so rural that fencing off every mile of railway would be simply uneconomic. THe UK is so much smaller, and landowners are perhaps more juristictional with the borders of their land, most certainly BR was.

When I went to Pittsburgh in 2011 I was also amazed at the prolific unmanned gateless open crossings. But it is the way of the States, it is the normal environment there. Our crossings are more contolled, but we don't have 150 wagon oil trains overturning as they seem to have. Different cultures, different transport infrastructures.

The LU Victoria line opened in 1968, and was and is (partly) operated using automatic train operation. But all trains carry drivers because of union insistence, passenger confidence, and human intervention in an emergency. Former LU employees have certain views.

it's the least risky modes of transport which generate the biggest headlines when something does go wrong.

Yes exactly, none the less tragic though.

In Hesperia CA, the railroad got rid of at grade crossings, plus one crossing that went under the railroad row was closed to vehicles, water and pedestrians can still go thru the concrete lined crossing. Nearby in Daggett one can hear the horns blow on the BNSF/UP dual track grade crossing, so loud that in Yermo one can here the train horns at night, this crossing is about 3-4 miles away. Daggett CA could use an overpass(bridge) there, but so far that has not happened.

BNSF Stacks with NS and DPU Power - Daggett, California(4 mins)

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The T1 Trust, PRR T1 Class 4-4-4-4 #5550, 1 of America's First HST's

Every (modern UK) tram has at least one equivalent to the old "deadman's handle". These devices require the driver to make a control movement at some (random) time interval. However, given the performance of the modern tram (in particular its acceleration), it is not impossible for a tram tram to accelerate from a safe speed to a dangerous speed in that time interval, particularly when approaching a significant speed restriction. Now one can see a flaw in the logic here - if the driver falls asleep and in so doing moves the control to full power the vigilance system sees this as a control movement and resets the timer. The timer is typically in the range 30seconds to a couple of minutes....

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Bob Smith
Member of Seti PIPPS (Pluto is a Planet Protest Society)
Somewhere in the (un)known Universe?

More likely a case of "excessive speed in the wrong place". No measurement of speed alone (except the really exceptional case of 'greater than maximum system-wide line speed') can contribute to safety, unless the monitoring equipment has a sense of vehicle location.

If the trams have a recorded message system for "the next station is ...", then they have that sense of location already. Possibly beef up the precision a bit, and tie it in to the speed monitor - why not?

If the trams have a recorded message system for "the next station is ...", then they have that sense of location already. Possibly beef up the precision a bit, and tie it in to the speed monitor - why not?

Can't do that it would cut into their profits and that's been the bottom line for years

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Life is what you make of it :-)

When i'm good i'm very good , but when i'm bad i'm shi#eloads better ;-) In't I " buttercups " p.m.s.l at authoritie !!;-)