There has been a head-on collision in France, between a passenger train and a freight train. The location is very near the Luxembourg border. The passenger train was traveling from Luxembourg City to Nancy in France. One track was closed and the passenger train crossedover to the other track where the collision occured. There are 13 reported fatalities so far. The location is near the French town of Zouftgen.
Here’s a link to the MSNBC story.
Its not clear from the picture, but the passenger train belongs to CFL
(Chemin de Fer du Luxembougies) the Luxembourg national railway, a Bombardier AGC type Doubledeck EMU. The service is pooled with similar equipment from SNCF for a joint service between Luxembourg City, and Nancy in NE France. The accident happened on the border section where one end is controlled by a CFL signal box and the other by a French signal box.
Here is a snipet of the story as reported by CBC:
Train switched tracks
The passenger train was travelling to the French city of Nancy from Luxembourg said Philippe Mirville, a spokesman for French rail operator SNCF. It had switched tracks because the line it was using was being repaired.
The freight train had a green light at the time of the crash, according to SNCF director-general Guillaume Pepy, who said there are no signs that it was speeding.
French President Jacques Chirac ordered the government to “oversee the mobilization of all rescue services and quickly bring to light the circumstances of this dramatic accident,” his office said.
Full story:
http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2006/10/11/france-train.html
Also CNN reports:
According to Bertrand Mertz, vice-president of the Lorraine Regional Council, who was interviewed on French broadcaster France 3 Lorraine, the cause of the accident was a switching error in Luxembourg.
French railway officials said the French freight train was on the right track and had the green light to proceed.
The head of the Luxembourg railway told CNN he could not comment on whether there had been a switching error. He said an investigation was needed to establish the facts.
The death toll has been revised down to five.
At least one positive point in a sad thread.
The German radio (South-West) reported the collision took place in a curve, so none of the engineers was able to do emergency-braking.
Please explain. Does this have to do with jacknifing, or something?
From pictures it looks like our FRA rules for body strenght and crash protection is quite a bit better than these soda cans.
But we still have people blabbering on running off shelf tin cans with our behemoth 220 ton locomotives on same tracks.
I don’t see anything in these pictures that show if this French train holds up better or worse then a FRA train would. What was the speed of impact? Was the freight very loaded up?
Anyways I’m not too confident that a head end FRA passenger car holds up very well in a head on colision even at low speed. I know that the FRA standards are higher then in Europe, but that doesn’t convince me that it actualy helps in head on collisions at speed.
If the said radio news are accurate, both engineers were running round the curve and practically seeing another train on the same track approaching. If the accident had taken place on a straight section of the line, they could have applied the brakes. Most probably, the collision would still have occured, since trains take a long time to stop, but it would have happende at a lower speed. This would have reduced the force of the impacts. And some of the passengers might have been able to run rearwards. But the border region between France and Luxemburg is quite hilly, so there must be a lot of curves on this route.
What irritates me is the fact that only a few hours after the accident took place, French politicians and spokesmen of the French National Railroad already knew for certain the human error that caused the collision had been committed in Luxemburg, not in France.
Keeping in mind that American diesel locomotives and freight trains are much heavier than European ones I think FRA strenght type passenger trains would not fare considerably better. Speed / momentum would be a key ingredient I think.
Note to self: better not going to sit in first, or for that mather last car of a train. See the pictures of this trainwreck and that of the maglev in Germany.
greetings,
Marc Immeker
you guys obvious never saw the live footage of the Metro Link Head on in California.
It was the middle part of the train that took the worst damage in some of the recent acccidents in the UK (e.g. Hatfield, Potters Bar), so it’s just luck really. Irrespective, a passenger train is statistically much safer than most other forms of transport (including walking!).
Tony
Further updates
Death toll has gone up to six as another body was found when a crane lifted a wrecked freight car up off of the EMU. Speculation from informed sources who are not involved in the accident investigation is that the EMU driver mistook the signal for a “Carre” signal, which allows a “Stop and Proceed”, when infact the signal was a “Carre - non-franchissable” which requires the driver to receive a registered permission slip from the signal box and then he must press a release button on the signal mast and this is recorded on either a punch tape or on a computer CD, basically a date logger for the signal. The freight train was the one running “wrong main” against the current of traffic, but the line was equipped with bi-directional signalling. If you look at this picture the EMU doesn’t seem to have come off that badly, the freight cars either came around, or over the locomotive of the freight. The locomotive is partially hidden by the tree.