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this post was submitted on 08 Feb 2024
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Hundreds ain't great but the average train these days has 20000 tons of cargo behind it -- could have been a lot worse.
Derailments are pretty common, actually. Like dozens to hundreds a year depending on the size of the company. I suspect a few incidents last year have made the news extra sensitive.
Most derailments are basically just the train falling off the track, very slightly. This was a full on train crash.
From the article and video, this seems to be one of those times it slightly came off the track. There doesn't seem to have been collision and the train remained upright.
I dunno, it's kind of borderline imo. It certainly suffered some damage, rather than a low speed step off that simply needs a crane to put things back into place.
If you do something with your car and it suffers damage, it's hard not to call that a crash. You might be able to drive it afterwards while holding the steering wheel at an odd angle, but you've still suffered crash-level damage.
Sure, there's damage, but the train didn't crash into anything. If I drove into the shoulder of the road and ran over a piece of debris, I could easily damage my car, but I didn't crash the car.
There's not really anything subjective here, the train didn't crash into anything. It derailed and suffered damage.
See that's technically a crash. You collided with the curb. It might not be a crash into another vehicle or into something like a tree or a lamppost, but you're still crashing into something.
In this case, the train collided with the ground, after falling off the rails. A low speed derailment would have no damage - akin to spinning out in an open road or something - but if you hit something and cause damage that breaches some threshold.
Roads with shoulders don't typically have curbs.
Driving over the lane lines does not involve hitting a curb. As I said, in this hypothetical scenario I drove into the shoulder and debris damaged my car. I did not crash.
There's nothing subjective about this incident. The train derailed. The train remained upright. The train did not collide with an object. The train was damaged. Honestly, you're really doing some mental gymnastics to rationalize your decision to call it a collision. If you're just going to do whatever you need to do to convince yourself that it was a collision, nothing I'm going to say will change your mind.
Mainly because the corporations won’t invest in safety systems
Or hire enough people for these super-long trains
In the US, maybe. Last derailment we had in Czechia was in 2010. Germany had it last year, but it's still less than once a year.
I don't buy that. Unless you define "derailments" as "giant catastrophe". Trains regularly slip off tracks, fall over, and occasionally catch fire, even in Europe.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1128848/accidents-on-european-rail-networks-by-country/
I am curious about the amount of rail in those countries vs the US. I know Europe likes their passenger trains a ton more than the US, but the US loves freight trains, and that seems to be where most of the derailments happen.
If the United States has, like, 20x the freight rail/trains, it would make sense for them to have 20x more derailments, essentially adjusting for population of freight trains. Not to give a pass to the States, for sure, but knowing this number would be a bit more helpful.
According to wikipedia:
Czechia has 9,567 km.
USA has 220,044 km.
Wow thanks for the information. I think this pretty well illustrates the point. The states have 22 times the rail as Czechia, so we'd expect Czechia to have 1/22 the incidents the states have. Now we need the number of incidents in each country and we can make a proper comparison.
I don't expect you to provide that, though, you've been more than enough help for a villain of such infamy miss Bonny ;p
You're welcome.