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by thingie 5370 days ago
I'm used to see 10 trains on an electrified railway line an hour in each direction, some of them very light EMUs, longer locomotive-hauled passenger trains and heavy freight (ok, heavy is ~2000 tons). With the last deadly accident with a passenger train hitting the freight (and falling from the bridge after that) in... 1970.
1 comments
kposehn 5370 days ago
Yep, signaling and operating rules are the biggest concern. If you run a railroad properly, you reduce the risk at far lower cost.

Which country are you in?

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thingie 5370 days ago
Czech republic, but you could, of course, see the same thing in Germany or Poland.

And of course, there are more frequent accidents on the lines that are equipped with only basic signalling. This year, a DMU hit shunting freight and one elderly woman died. But not because the DMU was badly damaged (I even think it's already back in the service), but because she wasn't sitting (the train barely left the station). I don't think that being in a heavier unit would help her. (Now, the line is being equipped with something that looks like ERTMS Regional, but... it's not. Another national standard...)

And yes, there are quite frequent problems with signalling failures crippling whole lines for hours (not causing crashes, at least). Almost like we can't have a thunderstorm without some failure.

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kposehn 5370 days ago
Ah, ok. Yeah, signaling in the Czech republic is a bit antiquated last I checked. They've been improving, but dispatching is really suffering as traffic density rises.

Thunderstorms crippling it sound like an issue with proper infrastructure maintenance/siting too.

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thingie 5370 days ago
Well, on the recently upgraded lines, there is an up to date system (bi-directional automatic block with cab signalling, not ETCS, yet, only GSM-R on the main lines), but of course, modernization is very slow indeed. Traffic density is hard to manage not because the signalling is deficient, but because various cost cuts that creates stupid bottlenecks (like not using grade separation at crucial junctions, or, also quite popular, not using switches that allow higher speeds to the diverging track).

(And we even got our own FRA-like nonsense: noise limits that demand to build a kilometre long, three meters high noise barriers for a single farm nearby the line in the forest…)

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